“He’s killing you.”

  She touched my cheek with her fingertips, there in the gathering darkness of twilight, then kissed me lightly on the lips. “It can’t be done. He’s too powerful.”

  I replied, “He’s constantly moving through spacetime to adapt his bioweapon microbe against your attempts to destroy it. He’s turning the entire continuum into a shambles in his mad lust for dominance. He’s got to be stopped.”

  “But if we other Creators, with all our powers, can’t stop him, how could you?”

  “I almost killed him once, back in the time of Troy. Remember?”

  “He was raving mad then.”

  “And you fellow Creators pulled me off him. I could have snapped his neck, but the others stopped me.”

  Despite her fears and her weakness, Anya smiled at me. “We may have made a mistake.”

  “May have? You tried to cure his madness and now he’s killing you.”

  “Orion,” Anya said, “I know how brave you are, and how much you love me. But to attempt to kill Aten is worse madness than he himself displays. He will destroy you with the flick of a finger. Destroy you utterly, and never revive you again.”

  I shrugged. “So what? I don’t want to live if it means serving him forever, lifetime after lifetime. I don’t want to live if you die, if he kills you.”

  “It’s hopeless, Orion. Useless.”

  I got to my feet, extended my arms to her and helped her up. “It’s not hopeless, my darling. I have hope. That may be all I’ve got, but I won’t give up hope until the life is crushed out of me.”

  Anya’s gaze shifted away from me. She took in the splashing stream, the trees swaying in the evening breeze, the first stars beginning to appear in the darkening sky.

  “We’d better go back,” she said, with a sigh.

  “Yes,” I said. “We have work to do.”

  I closed my eyes and felt the abyssal cold of the interstices in the spacetime continuum. It may have been only my imagination but it seemed to me that it took a longer span than usual to translate us back to that chamber beneath the surface of the planet Prime. Time is meaningless in-between spacetimes, but I sensed that the old pathways were coming apart, unraveling like a frayed ball of twine, the ripples of causality churning into a chaotic froth.

  Once again Anya sat at the head of the long, polished conference table. I stood beside her, a spotlight of energy still glowing around me in the otherwise shadowed chamber. She was old, weary, gray and dying.

  The light around me dissolved and I was free to go to her, take her in my arms. She felt frail and dust-dry, as if she could crumble at my touch.

  But her eyes were still luminous, still alive and alert.

  “You’ll have to be my strength, Orion,” she said. “I can’t last much longer.”

  Spheres of energy appeared along the table, glowing fitfully, feebly. They resolved themselves into a half dozen of the Creators, all of them aged, withered, dying.

  “The Old Ones have sent a message through Orion,” Anya told them. “They will not permit either of us to use the star-killer. They say they will eliminate us all if either the Commonwealth or the Hegemony attempts to do so.”

  Like the Creators surrounding Aten, these Creators also scoffed at the Old Ones’s threat.

  “How could they eliminate us? They don’t even have spacecraft. No technology at all.”

  “None that you can recognize,” I said, still standing beside Anya’s chair. “But they can control the forces of the Universe in their own way.”

  “It’s a bluff,” sputtered one of the gray-bearded men. “They’re afraid that we’ll attack their stars and they’re trying to frighten us.”

  “I don’t believe so,” said Anya. “They are far older than we. I suspect their powers are far greater than we can imagine.”

  “If that’s the case, then we might as well surrender to Aten right here and now.”

  “If the Old Ones have taken away our last trump card, then we’ve lost the war.”

  “We’ll have to throw ourselves on Aten’s mercy.”

  “He’d stop the ravages of this disease of his if we simply agree to follow his leadership.”

  They were old. They were tired. They had considered themselves immortal once, and now the prospect of painful death had them frightened and cowed.

  “I agree,” Anya said to them, her voice utterly weary, infinitely sad. “There is no further point to continuing this war. Despite the fact that we hold the military advantage at present, we have lost.”

  “Ask Aten for a truce.”

  “Call him now.”

  Anya said, “We don’t even have the strength to reach him. The disease has weakened us too much. We’ll have to send an emissary to him, physically.”

  I was about to tell them that I could reach Aten, but something made me hold my tongue. I glanced down at Anya sitting hunched over beside me. She did not look at me, but I got the distinct impression that she had warned me not to speak.

  “I will go to him,” Anya was telling the others. “Orion will convey me in his ship. You can return to your hibernation fields until I return.”

  They nodded among themselves, then one by one became encased in those glowing spheres of energy that they used to move through spacetime. The spheres shone weakly, though, as if they barely had enough power to cover the individual Creators. I knew that each of them had once been able to live in the emptiness of deep space in those spheres, drawing energy directly from the stars themselves. Now they looked as if they could barely make it to their separate chambers, deep beneath the Hegemony’s capitol, buried alive in hibernation crypts where they hoped they would be safe from the Commonwealth’s weaponry. They slept while their creatures fought and died for them.

  “Come, Orion,” said Anya, “it’s time to put an end to this fighting. Take me to your ship.”

  So all the fighting, all the strategy and battles came down simply to this: Threaten the Creators who had caused this war, and they were willing to surrender. Or at least ask for a truce. They thought nothing of sending billions of cloned warriors into battle, causing billions of deaths among the humans and other species. But threaten them, themselves, and they were ready to give up.

  I could barely conceal my contempt for them all, even Anya.

  And she knew it. She made a wan smile for me and said softly, “For what it’s worth, I never wanted this war.”

  I had no intention of surrendering to Aten, but I had to obey Anya’s wishes. Or at least, appear to obey.

  So I watched as Hegemony technicians slipped her inert form into a cryosleep capsule, an elaborately engraved metal sarcophagus, which we loaded aboard the Apollo. The technicians and other humans in the spaceport seemed to understand that their leaders had decided to surrender to the Commonwealth. Rumors of defeat hung heavy in the air. They were sullen, fearful, angry. But they did as they were told.

  Anya’s last waking thoughts warned me, Don’t let the Skorpis know that we are going to surrender. They would blow your ship out of the Galaxy if they knew.

  I wondered if the humans of Prime would try to stop us, but they were obedient and allowed us to break orbit and head out of the Zeta system.

  But not for long.

  We were accelerating as fast as we could, trying to achieve the safety of super-light velocity before anyone could deter us. We passed the rings of defenses that orbited Prime, then flew through the belt of battle stations that surrounded the Zeta system like a globe of bristling hedgehog spines.

  Someone back on the capital planet must have passed on the rumors of our intention to surrender to the Skorpis, for as we were clearing the outermost battle stations in the belt, we were hailed by a dour-faced Skorpis admiral.

  I took her message in my command chair on the bridge, wearing my best ship’s uniform.

  “There is ugly talk,” said the admiral, her teeth showing in a barely-suppressed snarl, “that you return to the Commonwealth to discuss surrender of the Hegemony.”

  “This ship carries one of your leaders in cryosleep,” I answered. “We are transporting her to Loris, the capital of the Commonwealth, at her command.”

  “To surrender?”

  A diplomat would have found evasive words. A politician would have lied. I was simply a warrior. “To discuss an armistice, a truce, an end to the war,” I said.

  “On Commonwealth terms,” the Skorpis admiral rumbled, like a lioness growling.

  “On the best terms that can be obtained.”

  “Surrender.”

  “Not surrender,” I insisted. “An armistice. Peace.”

  “Surrender,” she repeated. And I realized that she meant I should surrender my ship to her.

  “This vessel is on a diplomatic mission. We are carrying one of the Hegemony’s highest leaders. You cannot order us—”

  “Stop accelerating and prepare to be boarded by my warriors,” the Skorpis admiral insisted. “Otherwise we will destroy you, your ship, and the traitoress who wants to surrender.”

  I knew that every moment I could keep her talking was a moment closer to the relative safety of super-light.

  “On what authority do you make such an unreasonable demand?” I asked, as indignantly as I could.

  Her image in my display screen disappeared, instantly replaced by a view of a dozen Skorpis battle cruisers powering toward us.

  The Apollo rocked wildly.

  “They’ve opened fire on us!” Emon yelled. He was practically at my elbow; his shout was more from sudden excitement than fear. At least, I hoped so.

  “Evasive maneuvers,” I said.

  You can’t evade laser beams, even at relativistic speed. With a dozen battle cruisers within range of us, they blazed away, catching us in a cone of fire that sizzled our defensive screen and sent all the meters on the bridge deep into the red.

  It was a race to see whether they could overload our screen and penetrate it before we achieved super-light and winked out of their sector of spacetime.

  “Cancel the evasive maneuvers,” I said. “All available power to the main engines.”

  We were still shaking and rattling from the blasts of laser bolts drenching our screen. And in the static-streaked displays I could see the squadron of battle cruisers coming up on us, far faster than we were. I turned to Frede, strapped into the seat beside me.

  She knew what I was going to ask before I asked it. “Computer projects complete screen collapse fourteen seconds before we achieve superlight.”

  “That’s enough time—”

  “For them to vaporize us, yes,” Frede finished for me.

  There had to be something we could do.

  “Transfer power from the forward section of the screen to the rear. That’s where we’re being hit.”

  “But if those battle cruisers maneuver to come in on our forward section. . . .” She did not have to complete the sentence. One shot on an unscreened section of the ship would cut us in two like a hot knife going through butter.

  “Do it!” I snapped.

  Frede’s fingers licked across her keyboard. “Computer projects we’ll be in super-light twenty seconds before the screen overloads,” she said. Then added, “If nobody hits us forward.”

  We all held our breaths. The ship rocked and shivered under the pounding of the orbital stations’ guns. The battle cruisers were gaining on us steadily. Two of them spurted ahead, trying to get in front of us and attack us from that quarter.

  And then we flashed into superlight. All the display screens went blank and our shaking, shuddering ordeal was over.

  “We made it!” whooped Jerron, from his engineer’s console.

  “So far,” I said.

  Frede turned to me. “They know we’re heading for Loris. They can plant squadrons in all the likely places where we’d come out of super-light for navigational fixes. They’ll be waiting for us.”

  “Only if we follow the geodesic to Loris,” I said. “Now is the time for evasive maneuvers.”

  It was a gamble. We had to reach Loris before the Commonwealth started using the star-killers, but we could not approach Loris on the shortest route because Skorpis battle squadrons would be lying in wait along that way. So we had to take a more roundabout route, yet not such a distorted one that our arrival at Loris would be delayed too long.

  How long was too long? I had no way of knowing.

  Watches changed on the bridge, time flowed by, but I remained in my command chair, unwilling to leave. I did not sleep, I ate only what the crew members brought to me from time to time. I reached out mentally to Anya’s frozen body in the cryosleeper deep in our ship’s hold. She was alive, her mind slowly flickering in the cryogenic cold.

  I thought about attempting to contact Aten, but decided that the dangers there outweighed the advantages. He would read my thoughts the instant I reached him and know that although Anya and the other Creators were ready to bow to his will, I was out to murder him.

  Is there some way I can shield my thoughts from him? I asked Anya for her help, but her mind was so slowed by her frozen state that I doubted she could hear me.

  We remained in super-light velocity as long as we dared, then slowed to relativistic for a quick navigational fix. The course Frede had plotted for us was designed to take us a considerable distance from the direct geodesic route to Loris. But the closer we got to the Commonwealth planet, the more we would have to adhere to a course that the Skorpis could intercept.

  I knew what I would do if I were the Skorpis admiral. I would send a major fleet as close to Loris as I dared, keep it in super-light except for scout ships that hop down to relativistic speed, take a look around, and then power back into super-light once more. As soon as one of the scouts spotted us approaching Loris it could alert the main fleet with a gravitational pulse that could be detected in super-light. Then the entire fleet could go relativistic and catch us as we attempted to reach the planet.

  They would have to face the massive defenses of the entire Giotto system, I realized. But, as I played the possible scenarios on the ship’s tactical computer, it seemed to me that the Skorpis might not only catch us like a minnow in a net, they might be able to surprise the Commonwealth defenses and overwhelm them. It was a slim chance, but knowing the Skorpis, I thought it highly likely that they would grasp at it.

  I almost laughed aloud when I realized what was shaping up. Our “diplomatic” mission was going to lead to a sneak attack on the Commonwealth capital. Our effort to surrender and end the war was going to trigger the bloodiest battle of them all.

  And there was nothing I could do to avert it.

  CHAPTER 26

  Part of me felt almost exultant. A tremendous battle loomed ahead of us, and I was created for battle. The old excitement simmered within, making my innards tremble with anticipation.

  Yet another part of me was filled with revulsion. Not fear, but loathing. How many of my command had already died? And for what? How many had I killed, over the eons? I remembered assassinating Ogotai, the High Khan of the Mongols, my friend, my hunting companion. I remembered the slaughter once we had pierced the walls of Troy. And Jericho. I remembered Philip’s accusing stare as the blood filled his mouth and gushed from the slash in his belly.

  When will there be an end to blood? The Golden One boasted that he created the human race to fight for him. Could we not overcome the aggression he had built into us? Could we not learn to live in peace?

  “Your sentiments do you honor, friend Orion.” It was the voice of the Old Ones speaking in my mind.

  I sat in the command chair on the Apollo’s bridge, but my eyes saw the depths of the oceans in which the Old Ones lived. And I was there among them, swimming in their midst, safe and warm in the bubble of energy they had prepared for me.

  “My sentiments won’t solve the problem we face,” I said.

  “The problem you face, Orion, not we.”

  “You are not willing to help?”

  I felt a slight tremor of disappointment among them. “You must solve your own problems, my friend. Otherwise they are not solved, merely postponed.”

  “Yet you threaten to wipe out any species that tries to use a starweapon.”

  A patient sigh. “Our ethical code demands that we leave younger species alone to work out their own destinies. But that same code cannot allow stars to be wantonly destroyed. A species willing to use such power is a danger not merely to itself, it is a danger to the entire continuum.”

  “Meaning that it’s a danger to you.” They fluttered their many tentacles, colors spiralling across the breadths of their huge, undulating bodies.

  “Yes,” they admitted at last. “Such a species would be a danger to us and everything else in the continuum.”

  “Does your ethical code allow you to help me to prevent this catastrophe?”

  A long delay, while they swam about me and flashed colors at one another.

  Finally, “Orion, you are laboring under a misapprehension. You apparently believe that if you could eliminate one of your species—this one you refer to as Aten, or the Golden One—that his demise would solve your problem.”

  “Won’t it?”

  “No. We fear not.”

  “But—”

  “Your species is very violent, Orion. It is part of your makeup. Even you, who are struggling to overcome this heritage of blood, can think of the solution to your problem only in terms of murder.”

  “Aten must be stopped. He is killing his fellow Creators. He seeks—”

  “We know. We have seen it in your mind. But suppose you succeed in murdering Aten. Do you believe that will end your war? Hundreds of billions of humans are struggling against one another. They use weapons of constantly increasing power and horror. Will the death of one of you stop the death desires in your entire species?”

  I had to think about that for a while. The Old Ones respected my silence.

  Choosing my words carefully, I said, “The first step is to stop the fighting, to put an end to this war. That by itself will not end the violence in the human psyche, but it will stop the killing. Then perhaps we can learn how to live in peace.”

 

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