Orion Among the Stars

Chapter 31

So I told my Tsihn interrogator my whole story, even the truth about Aten and the other Creators. It listened with great interest, I thought, although it was impossible to read any expression on its reptilian face. But it was polite and even seemed curious, interrupting me with questions time and again.

All through my long narration, though, a part of my mind kept repeating to me that they were going to kill me. Kill Frede and Jerron and the rest of my crew. Why? Why execute loyal soldiers who had fought so hard for them?

It was my fault. I had disobeyed orders and taken them to Prime. As far as the Commonwealth was concerned, I was a traitor, and very likely a spy from the Hegemony. My crew was going to die because of me.

But then I began to think of the other factors. Somewhere in this mess was Aten, the Golden One, trying to manipulate the humans, their allies, their enemies, even the other Creators. He would kill Anya now that he had her in his possession. And I had delivered her to him.

“He’ll kill you, too,” I told my interrogator.

The young Tsihn blinked its yellow eyes. “What do you mean by that?”

“Aten doesn’t want his creatures to know that he is manipulating them. He doesn’t want the Commonwealth to know that this war is being fought because of an argument among the Creators.”

The Tsihn officer was silent for a long moment. Then it said, “Either you are a very creative liar, Orion, or an absolute psychotic. Your invention of the Creators has some aspect of poetry to it, I must admit, but you carry it too far.”

“He’ll kill you to keep my story from leaking out,” I said.

“I am not one of his creatures—if he exists at all.”

“How many Tsihn have died in this war? How many more will be killed?”

“That’s enough, Orion,” said the reptilian. “This session is finished.”

I climbed to my feet, legs tingling from sitting so long. “Your life is now in danger,” I told it. Jerking a thumb toward the guards at the door, I added, “Theirs, too.”

The Tsihn remained on his stool, barely eye level with me. “Nonsense,” it scoffed.

“Is it? I presume this session has been recorded, even though I don’t see any equipment.”

Its eyes darted to a corner of the ceiling.

“Play back the recording. See if it’s intact. I’ll bet it’s already been erased.”

“Nonsense,” it said again. But it sounded just a bit weaker to me. It ordered the guards to take me back to my cell. They said not a word to me.

As the cell door slammed behind me, I knew there was only one person who could save my crew from execution. I threw myself on the bare thongs of the cot and squeezed my eyes shut in concentration. Aten was nearby; I could feel his presence, almost smell him.

But he refused to make contact with me. As I tried, I sensed a blank wall, like an energy screen he had built around himself to keep me away from him.

Very well, then. I went elsewhere. I gathered my strength and my knowledge and tried to contact the Old Ones. I called across the light-years for their aid, their wisdom.

Stop the war, Orion, they told me.

“How? What can I do? I can’t even protect my own crew; we’re all going to be executed.”

Find the strength, they said.

“Help me,” I pleaded. “If you want this war to be stopped, then help me.”

A vague sigh of disappointment. It is your problem, Orion, not ours. The problem of the human race. We will not make ourselves your guardians, your conscience, your protectors. You must do it for yourselves.

“You would exterminate us,” I countered.

Only if you become a threat to stars themselves. We have no right to interfere unless you begin to threaten the life of the entire galaxy with your violence.

And they showed me why they were concerned. I saw whole stars exploding, one after another. In a closely packed star cluster, a chain reaction began, dozens of stars erupting into shattering cataclysm, the shock waves from each explosion triggering dozens more, hundreds more. I saw whole galaxies torn apart by titanic explosions at their cores that engulfed millions of stars, tens of millions of planets, countless living creatures. Whole civilizations, intelligent species that had struggled for millennia to reach out among the stars, wiped out in smothering waves of explosions that ripped across megaparsecs, destroying everything in their path, reducing flesh and mind and hope to wildly contorted clouds of ionized gas.

This has been done in other galaxies by intelligences very much like your own, the Old Ones told me. This we cannot permit here. We have no desire to be your guardian angels, Orion, but we will be your angels of death if you try to destroy the stars.

I opened my eyes and found myself still in my cell, alone, abandoned by the Old Ones, shunned by the Creators, without even a rat to keep me company. Somewhere the Tsihn were interrogating Frede and the others, I knew. Somewhere an execution squad was waiting for us. I wondered if Captain Perry would be invited to watch.

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.

Use your brain, friend Orion, I heard the Old Ones whisper. Your strength does not avail you now. You must use your intelligence.

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.

Is that so?a sneering voice in my mind challenged. The echo of Aten’s arrogant disdain.

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.”

That started them arguing. I assured them of the Old Ones’ resolve. “Weapons powerful enough to destroy whole stars can set up chain reactions that can destroy much of the galaxy, perhaps the entire galaxy. That will not be permitted.”

“Who are you to make such threats?”

I smiled coldly. “In a sense, I am the ambassador from the Old Ones and the other ancient species of this galaxy. They have remained aloof from us because we are too young and too ignorant to be of interest to them. But now that we threaten the existence of the galaxy, they have no choice but to take notice of us—and take action.”

They did not want to believe me, but after long hours of debate and argument they began to accept what I told them. The sun sank behind the lofty trees and night came on. I kept them at the table, protected and warmed by a bubble of energy. I produced food and allowed them to leave the table briefly, knowing that there was no place in this continent-wide forest that they could escape to.

“No one returns to their own time and place until a peace agreement has been reached,” I said.

Days went by. They argued, they railed at each other, they hurled accusations and threats across the table. I reminded them that unless they began working toward peace I would begin shooting them. And I pointed to the loudest of the loudmouths.

“You’ll go first,” I said.

His eyes widened, but he stopped his insults and imprecations.

It was like a giant group-therapy session. It took time for them to air their true resentments, their real fears. They accused one another of all sorts of aggressions and atrocities, at first. But gradually, knowing that there was no alternative, knowing that they themselves were facing death, they began to get to the underlying causes of the war.

I knew that the real cause was the manipulations of the Creators. No matter what these humans and aliens agreed upon, the Creators could upset it in the blink of an eye. I realized that after I had finished with these politicians, I would have to face the Creators. Led by Aten, the Golden One.

I was surprised that he did not show himself here, even indirectly, disguised as one of the politicians. Probably he was content to let me work out a peace agreement, and then rip it to shreds before it could be implemented. He enjoyed playing with the human race that way, toying with us, tempting us and then degrading us when we reached for greatness. Like flies to wanton boys, I thought. Except that this fly has no intention of allowing any god to pull its wings off. Not now that I’ve learned how to use them.