Anya. I reached out for her, to the cryonic capsule where she slept, still frozen, barely alive, her mind pulsing so slowly as the last dregs of her strength ebbed away that I could not feel even a flicker of her presence. I sensed a team of technicians probing her capsule, trying to decide whether they should attempt to revive her or just shut down the cryonic systems and let her die.
“Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble for nothing,” one of the techs said. “This capsule’s empty.”
Empty!
“How could it be empty?” asked the tech’s supervisor. “Those soldiers brought it all the way from Prime, they said.”
“Take a look. X rays, magnetic resonance, neutrino scan—there’s nobody inside this capsule. It’s empty.”
With a bellow of rage there in my cell I realized that the Golden One had outwitted me once again. He had removed Anya’s dying body from the capsule. He had her in his possession. Perhaps she was already dead.
I leaped to my feet and roared like a jungle animal. I howled and threw myself at the heavy door of my cell. Its reinforced steel barely quivered at my pounding. I slid to the concrete floor and leaned my head against the door. Everything we had done, all the blood and killing, all the dead and wounded we had suffered—all for nothing. Aten had Anya in his grasp and we were going to be executed and there was no one in the whole continuum who would help me.
Wonderful advice. Locked in a prison cell, lost and abandoned. I butted my head softly against the door. How could I get out of here? And what should I do, if I could get out?
I could translate myself to another point in space-time, travel across the continuum to another era, light- years away from here. But what good would that do? I had to save my crew. I had to stop the war. I had to rescue Anya, if she still lived.
I closed my eyes. Somewhere in the galaxy, I realized, there is a matter transceiver that the Creators use for their travels across space-time. It must be enormously powerful, compared to the transceivers we are using in this era. Powered by a star, I guessed, or perhaps even a whole cluster of stars. It extends into the continuum, flickers across space-time so that the Creators can tap into its energies and translate themselves whenever and wherever they are. I myself have used that transceiver without even realizing that it existed. The Creators’ mystical tricks are nothing more than very advanced technology, after all.
And what they can do, I told myself, I can do.
I pushed myself to my feet, there in my cell. “Yes, it is so,” I said aloud, hoping that Aten could hear me, wanting him to see what I was about to do.
I felt the stupendous energy of that immense transceiver pulsating across the waves of space-time, rippling through the continuum like a steady, strong heartbeat. I tapped into that energy, not blindly as I had before, but purposefully, knowingly.
I reached into the cells in this prison where the rest of my crew were being held. I searched across the capital city, across the entire planet of Loris, and found all the members of the Commonwealth’s High Council. I extended my awareness across light-years to Prime and located all the members of the Hegemony’s Central Command.
I brought them all together, at the place and time of my choosing: the primeval forest of Paradise on Earth, at the end of the last Ice Age.
As I translated my crew there I decked them in dress uniforms of blue and gold and gave each of them a sidearm in a white leather holster. The politicians of the Commonwealth and Hegemony came as they were, some in street clothes, some in sleepwear, one in swimming trunks, another in nothing but a bath towel. Not all of them were human, of course. Tsihn reptilians joined my meeting, as did Skorpis generals and several other alien species, including a clutch of Arachnoids.
I arranged a clearing in the forest with a long conference table in its middle. The politicians I placed in chairs along the table, Commonwealth on one side, Hegemony on the other. I set up a ten-meter-high web at the foot of the table for the Arachnoids to cling to. I put scratchpads on the table for the Skorpis and water sprayers for the one amphibian species.
There was a considerable uproar, of course. Humans and aliens alike yelled, screeched, thundered a thousand questions at one another. They ignored me as I stood at the head of the table in a uniform of blood red, my arms folded across my chest. My own crew seemed just as startled and confused as the rest.
I let the politicians babble and called Frede to my side.
“What is this?” she asked, breathless, her eyes wide with stunned surprise. “How did you—”
“I’ll explain later,” I said. “Right now I want you and the rest of the crew to serve as a guard of honor. And to make sure that none of these politicians leave the table.”
Frede blinked twice, a thousand questions in her eyes. But she turned without another word and set up the crew at parade rest evenly spaced around the table, their backs to the trees and flowering foliage of Paradise.
The politicians were still jabbering and bickering among themselves, hurling accusations across the table.
I took the pistol from my red leather holster and fired a sizzling laser beam down the length of the table, burning a hole in its end just short of the Arachnoid web. They all jerked back, shocked into silence.
I smiled at them and put the pistol away as I said, “You’re probably wondering why I asked you here this morning.”
“Who are you?”
“Where are we?”
I held up my hands to silence them before any more questions could be asked.
“We are on Earth, at a time approximately twelve and a half millennia earlier than your own era.”
“Nonsense!”
“A patent lie, no one can travel across time. Our scientists have tried it and—”
“Shut up!” I snapped in my best military voice of command.
They shut up.
“You don’t have to believe a word I say,” I told them. “That doesn’t matter at all. What does matter is this: You are going to sit at this table until you have hammered out an agreement to end the war.”
They stirred at that.
“I don’t care if take days or years. No one leaves this time and place until you have agreed on peace. Once you do, you will be returned precisely to the times and places you were when I brought you here.”
“And what do you propose to do if we refuse to discuss peace?” asked the biggest Tsihn there, a real dragon with multihued scales encrusted with decorations.
“I will shoot you, one at a time, until you do begin meaningful discussions.”
Half of them leaped to their feet, shouting.
“How dare you?”
“You can’t—you wouldn’t!”
But they saw my troopers standing behind them, saw the guns at their waists, the grim smiles on their youthful-yet-aged faces.
“You will make peace or you will die,” I said sternly. “Just as you send your soldiers to be killed in battle, now you can face death yourselves.”
“You would kill unarmed civilians?”
“Who killed the people of Yellowflower?” I asked. “Who wiped out the Hegemony colonies? Who gave the orders?”
They sank back into their chairs.
“Listen to me,” I urged them. “If the war goes on, one side or the other will begin to use star-wrecking weapons. When you come to that point, the older species of the galaxy will annihilate all of you, without mercy and without remorse. You will all be exterminated like vermin.”
