Her disapproving frown nettled me. I wanted to tell her what the Seljuks did to Christian women when they captured them, wanted to describe the villages we had seen where the women had been raped and then put to the sword hideously, where babies had been spitted alive and used as footballs, where fire and knives were used for torturing helpless children.
But I said nothing. Because I was ashamed. My own troops had done much the same to the Moslem villages we had sacked.
“They’re heathens,” the old man snapped. “Servants of the Antichrist. Killing them isn’t the same as killing a Christian. The Patriarchs of the Church have told us so. They’re not even human, really.”
“Their blood’s as red as ours,” I heard myself mutter.
“Good! Spill as much of it as you can.”
Leave as quickly as you can and return to the wars, he was telling me. And I resolved to do exactly that. This was not my home and never could be. As soon as my leg healed properly, I would go back to the fighting, I told myself.
After dinner, the two boys offered to share their bed with me. I laughed and told them that I had been sleeping on the ground for so long that a bed would probably keep me awake. So I unrolled my sleeping blanket and stretched out on the floor next to their bed in the upstairs room.
Just before I drifted to sleep, the older of the two boys said, “Next year I’ll be old enough to join the army.”
“Don’t,” I said. “Stay here and help your family.”
“There’s no glory in staying here.”
“There’s no glory in war,” I said. “Believe me. Nothing but pain and blood.”
“But fighting the Seljuks is doing God’s work!”
“Living is doing God’s work, son. Killing people is the work of the devil.”
“But it’s all right to kill the Seljuks. The priests have blessed the war.”
Yes, I thought wearily. They always do.
“The emperor himself—”
“Go to sleep,” I snapped. “And forget about the army. Only a fool goes to war when he doesn’t have to.”
That shut him up at last. I turned on my side and went to sleep, dreaming of the distant future when ships flew among the stars.
Chapter 27
I awoke in my quarters aboard the
“You’d better look at the imagery from our last navigation check,” she said, once I had opened my eyes and sat up in the bunk.
Blinking the sleep away, I pointed to the display screen set against the bulkhead. “Put it on the screen.”
There had been a pair of Skorpis warships among the stars.
“Did they detect us?” I asked.
Frede shrugged. “They had to. We were only at sublight for thirty seconds, but their sensors are as good as ours or better. They picked us up, all right.”
“Did they make any move to stop us?”
“In thirty seconds?”
I studied the alphanumeric data at the bottom of the screen. The Skorpis warships had been drifting along on minimum power.
“Looks like they were waiting for us to show up,” I said.
“The Hegemony must be covering as many of our potential reentry points as possible,” Frede said. “They want to know where we are and how soon we’ll reach the Giotto system.”
Swinging my legs off the bunk and reaching for my tunic, I asked, “How close to Loris can you put us? If we can come out of superlight well inside the system’s defenses we ought to be safe enough.”
“Their automated defenses will shred us within microseconds. Same as Prime and the Zeta system, remember?”
“Message capsules worked then. We could send out message capsules ahead of us, tell them we’re coming in.”
With a frown, Frede added, “And bringing the whole Skorpis fleet with us.”
“What choice do we have?” I asked.
She leaned her back against the hatch to the bridge and did not speak for several moments. I wondered if she did not know what to reply, or if she knew so well that she was rehearsing the words she would use before speaking them.
“We could change course,” she said at last. “Why do we have to go to Loris? Why put ourselves into the lion’s mouth? There are hundreds of other planetary systems, thousands of them. The Commonwealth—”
“We’ve got to bring our passenger to the Commonwealth’s leaders. They’re on Loris. That’s where we must go.”
“We could go to a thousand other planets and send word to Loris,” Frede countered.
“And if the Skorpis found us on one of those other planets?”
“The chances of that happening are so low—”
“But if they do, what are the chances of our surviving? Zero,” I told her, before she could answer. “At Loris we have all the defenses of the Giotto system on our side. We have a fighting chance.”
She looked utterly unconvinced. I could not tell Frede that my real reason for insisting on Loris was that Anya was dying. Even in cryosleep she grew weaker every day. Aten was killing her and the only way to make him stop was to confront him, to overpower him and the other Creators who had allied themselves with him. To kill him.
He would not come to a rendezvous at some out-of-the-way planet. He had made Loris his headquarters, the capital of the Commonwealth. So I had to go to Loris, I had to bring Anya there, I had to face the Golden One.
Frede’s expression made me realize that I was, in all probability, about to get all of us killed.
But I pulled myself up to my full height and gave the order, “Direct geodesic to Loris. No more evasions. We bore straight in.”
“And damn the torpedoes,” she muttered.
“What?”
“An old naval expression. From ancient history.”
With no external points of reference there was no way for our unaided human senses to get any feeling for our ship’s speed. The instruments told us we were hurtling along at many multiples of the speed of light, but for all we could tell the
Yet the morning arrived when Frede said to me, “We’re within two days of the Giotto system. Time to start sending out message capsules.”
I got the feeling that out there in that blank nothingness surrounding us, the entire Skorpis battle fleet was riding along with us, waiting for us to slow down to relativistic velocity once again, their weapons primed and ready to blast us into an expanding fireball of ionized atoms.
Tension on the bridge grew tighter with each passing moment. We fired off every message capsule we possessed, then used the ship’s matter transceiver to make still more of them, converting some of our food stocks to do so.
“We won’t need more than two days’ worth of food,” I told the transceiver crew. “In three days’ time we’ll be having our meals on Loris.”
“Or in hell,” grumbled one of the technicians when he thought I was too far down the passageway to hear him.
