Ben Bova: Orion Among the Stars

“Who’s in charge here?” it asked again.

“I am,” I said, realizing the truth of it as I spoke the words. “My name is Orion, captain of this hundred.”

Those glittering eyes fixed on me. “Very well, Orion. Get your troops on their feet and ready for action—”

Another jolt rocked the room. This time it felt like an explosion. And sounded like one, too. The troops tottered and staggered. I grabbed the edge of my sleep capsule to keep from falling down.

The reptilian made a slight hissing noise. “You’ve got to be ready for action in one hour. That’s an order, soldier.”

It ducked back through the hatch. I realized that its equipment web was empty, mere decoration. We were going into action, all right, but it wasn’t.

The mist from the sleepers was almost completely gone. The troops were standing uncertainly, still unsure of themselves, their minds still fogged with cryonic sleep.

“All right,” I said, loudly and firmly, “you heard what the lizard said. We’re going into action. Fall in!”

They eyed me suspiciously, sullenly almost, but pulled themselves together and formed files alongside their sleeper units. Sergeants stood at the head of each row, and three lieutenants—two of them women—marched barefooted to the front of the room and stood at attention before me. No one seemed distressed by their nudity.

I did not know these troopers. I had been placed in their command just before the expedition took off, I recalled. Their regular captain had been relieved of duty for reasons that had not been explained to me. I had all the personnel data in my head, of course, but those were merely cold facts from their files. These hundred soldiers were all strangers to me.

I could remember! I marveled at that. As I marched my hundred to the lockers for their clothes, armor, equipment and weapons, I rejoiced in the fact that my memory had not been wiped clean by the Golden One. I wondered why this time was different. Aten always erased my memory after each of my missions. Sometimes I had overcome his erasures, sometimes I reclaimed my memories. Aten often smirked that he allowed me to remember, that I could never have overcome his erasure with nothing but my own efforts. I myself thought that Anya probably helped me.

But now I could remember it all—or at least, I could remember a lot. Anya. I loved her and she loved me. She was one of the Creators, as far beyond me as a goddess is to a mortal, but she loved me. She had risked her life to be with me in all the ages I had been sent to by Aten. I wanted to find her, to be with her, forever.

But there was a crisis, out among the stars, far from Earth. Anya was out there fighting somewhere, as were the other Creators. Fighting for their lives. Fighting for the survival of the human race. Fighting for the survival of the continuum.

Against whom? I had no idea. Was this the time of the great crisis in the continuum that Aten and the other Creators had feared so deeply? Is that why I was here, with my memories intact?

I wondered about that. How much of my memories were with me? There was no way to tell. How do you know if you don’t remember a lifetime or two? I could hear Aten’s mocking laughter in my mind. It seemed to say that I remembered what he allowed me to remember, nothing more. I was his creature, destined throughout all the lifetimes of the continuum to do his bidding.

“ORION TO THE BRIDGE.” The order sounded from the speakers of the ship’s intercom, overhead. “ON THE DOUBLE.”

My troops hardly glanced at me as they pulled on their armor and equipment and hefted the heavy weapons we would be using planetside. They were veterans, despite their seeming youth.

I headed for the bridge without hesitation, finding my way through the labyrinthine passageways of the huge battle cruiser as if I had never been anywhere else. We were part of an invasion fleet, and our approach to the target planet was not unopposed. There was a battle going on, our invading fleet against their defenders.

At each double-doored hatch there was a sentry, a reptilian with insignia painted onto its scales and a sidearm buckled around its middle. Each time I flinched, remembering Set and his minions and how they had tried to make the Earth their own. But each of these sentries stiffened to attention at my approach and saluted with three-taloned hands.

They had one thing in common with Set’s species; their size told their age, and their age told their rank. The bigger they were, the older and higher-ranking. I wondered what happened to reptilians who did not get promoted as they aged.

The bridge was small and cramped and eerily quiet with the tension of battle. Nothing but reptilians at the consoles, the cruiser’s captain at the center bigger than all the others, of course. They were all absorbing data directly through the cyborg jacks plugged into their temples, their eyes covered with wide-spectrum lenses that showed them everything that the ship’s sensors detected, far more than unaided eyes could see.

For me, though, there was nothing to see except these rapt reptilians at their duty stations, claws clicking on keyboards set into the armrests of their chairs. There were no screens for human eyes, nothing but blank metal bulkheads and consoles covered with dials and gauges that meant nothing to me. The bridge was uncomfortably hot, and had a strange dry charred smell to it, like a desert in a blazingnoon sun.

Suddenly a hot glow blossomed off to one side of the bridge, burning through the bulkhead plates like a laser hit. I tried to call out a warning to the bridge crew but my voice would not work. The glow grew brighter, larger. I thought the ship’s shields had been broken through; in another instant the hull would be ripped open to vacuum.

None of the reptilians noticed a thing. Behind their lenses and cyborg jacks they remained intent on the battle. The glow turned golden, too bright to look at, yet I could not turn my eyes from it. Tears began to blur my vision as the glow dimmed slightly and resolved itself to the human form of Aten, the Golden One.

“Tears of joy, Orion, at seeing your creator once again?” he mocked.

He looked calmly magnificent in the midst of that terribly tense, inhumanly quiet bridge. He wore a splendid high-collared uniform of dazzling white, with gold piping and sunburst insignia on his chest. His thick mane of golden hair glowed magnificently; his cruelly handsome face was set in a cold smile.

“Or perhaps you feel frustrated at not being able to view the battle,” he said.

All at once I could see in my mind a planet nearby, and dozens of spacecraft swarming toward it. Defending craft were rising through its atmosphere, firing lasers and missiles as they approached our fleet. Three of their ships exploded soundlessly, vivid red blossoms of destruction against the planet’s blue ocean.

“The battle goes well,” the Golden One said.

The ship shook again from another blast, nearly knocking me off my feet.

“So I see,” I replied dryly.

Aten arched a golden brow. “Humor, Orion? Irony? My creature is expanding his repertoire of behaviors.”

“Where is Anya?” I asked.

His expression turned more thoughtful. “Far from here.”

“I want to see her.”

“Not now. You have an important task to accomplish.”

“This is the crisis that you spoke of, long ago?”

His smirk returned. “Long ago? Ah yes, you are still bound by a linear sense of time, aren’t you?”

“Don’t play games with me.”

“Impatient, too! Eager to see the goddess whom you love, I see.”

“Where is she?”

“Your duty to me comes first, Orion.”

“Who are these reptilians? Why are humans among them?”

“These lizards are our allies in the war, Orion. They are carrying your assault team in their ship.”