CHAPTER 36

I stood there gazing into her gray eyes and saw whirlpools within whirlpools, wheels within wheels, the entire continuum of stars and galaxies and atoms and quarks spinning in an endless cycle of creation and change. I did not understand, could not understand, what Adena was telling me. But I believed every syllable that she spoke.

I was in love with a goddess, a goddess who would someday be worshipped by human beings, human beings who were created by the gods. The cycle of creation, the wheel of life, the continuum of the universe.

And this was the continuum that Ahriman sought to destroy.

The silver aura surrounding us faded away, and a blast of icy wind sent a shudder through me. I heard its howl, then the muted voices of the soldiers inside the cave. Kedar's hand closed around the tool he was reaching for. We were back in normal space-time.

"The wind has shifted," she said. "The storm will be passing by in another few hours. They'll attack then."

I focused my attention on her, on the here and now. "Can we hold out against them?"

"As long as our power holds. Once the battery packs are drained, though..." She let the thought dangle.

"There are others," I probed, "other units in the area, aren't there? Can we get help?"

Adena hesitated a moment, then said, "This is the last battle, Orion. The brutes that are gathering out there are all that's left of them."

"And us? You mean that we're all that's left of the human army?"

"We're all the humans there are," she said.

"What about the commanders, up in the orbiting ships?"

With a single small shake of her head, Adena replied, "There are no ships, no commanders. The transmissions that Marek is receiving come from Ormazd. He doesn't want us to know it, but we are quite alone here. There will be no help for us."

"I don't understand!"

That bitter smile touched her lips again. "You're not supposed to understand, Orion. I've already told you far more than Ormazd wants you to know."

She stepped past me, no longer the goddess now, but the human commander of a lost, trapped, expendable detachment of human soldiers. I stood at the cave's entrance, letting the icy wind slice through me, almost enjoying its bitter cold. The thoughts spinning around in my head led nowhere, but out in that waning storm, I knew, waited the ultimate enemy. This tiny group of men and women carried the fate of the continuum in their hands. Soon the battle would begin, and the victor would inherit the world, the universe, all eternity.

"Orion?"

I turned and saw Rena standing there, an apprehensive little frown on her elfin face.

She tried to smile. "The commander says we should all get into our armor now and check weapons."

I nodded and followed her back to the area where the cots floated in ragged rows. The others were pulling on their armor suits. I found mine and followed Rena's example: the bodyshell first, then the legs, the boots, the arms, the magically thin gloves, and finally the equipment belt. I hefted my helmet; it had a two-way communicator built into it and a visor that could slide down to cover the face completely. The visor was completely transparent from the inside but opaque from the outside. Once the troops had them on, I could not see their faces. Only the insignias emblazoned on their shoulders and the names stenciled on their chests told me who they were.

Once we had checked out the suits, Rena led me to the power packs that Kedar was nursing so tenderly and we charged up our suit batteries. Then we joined the others as they lined up for weapons issue.

Adena watched as Ogun, the squad's burly, sour-faced armorer, grimly handed each soldier a pair of weapons: a long-barreled, rifle-like gun and a pistol that plugged into the suit's battery pack.

When I stepped up before him, Ogun scowled at me and turned to Adena. "Give him a pistol," she said. "He will work the heavy gun, with me."

The pistol was like the one I had found on me when I had been stranded here out in the storm. I hefted it in my gloved hand.

"It has its own battery," Rena said, "but regulations are that you plug it into the suit. That extends its range and duration."

I glanced down at her and nodded. She looked strange in armor and helmet, almost like a child playing at war. But this was no game, as I could tell from the sober expressions on the faces around me.

They were an experienced squad. Once armed, they moved out toward the cave's mouth and took up positions where they could cover each other with protective fire while at the same time raking the sloping field of snow that led up to the cave.

I stood uncertainly in the middle of the cave, watching the soldiers and not knowing what I should do. Rena gave me a fleeting smile and hurried to a large metallic crate that rested at the side of the cave. She touched a few buttons on its top and it levitated several inches from the floor and followed her like a dutiful pet dog as she joined the others at the cave's entrance.

"You can help me," Ogun said. His voice, like his looks, was surly. He headed back toward the deeper recesses of the cave. I followed him.

"Rena's biowar," he told me, without my asking a question. "Her equipment checks what the brutes are throwing at us in the way of viruses and microbes. We lost a lot of good people before we realized what they could do with those little killers. Instant poisons. Paralyze you, tear your guts inside out, make you blind, choke you—they got some beauties."

"They work instantly?" I asked.

"Faster than you can blink your eyes," he said as we ducked through a low passageway worn in the rock. "That's why you got to keep your visor down and locked and breathe nothing but the suit's air until Rena gives us the all-clear. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

His face contorted in what might have been a grin. Despite his sour looks and demeanor, Ogun was a man who cared about the others around him. "Well," he huffed, "there it is. Let's get it into position."

It was a heavy-looking mass of tubes and coils that looked to me vaguely like a cannon. Ogun activated its gravitic lifters and it floated up off the cold rock floor. We nudged it down the shadowy passageway toward the front of the cave, with him warning me every other step of the way to be careful not to bang it against the stone wall.

"Are you sure that there's only one entrance to this cave?" I asked as we guided the heavy weapon toward the entrance.

Ogun nodded. "We've been holed up here six days. The commander had us explore every inch. All those passageways end in blind alleys, except for the one that drops down into the water. Damned near fell into it myself. It goes deep. Nobody's going to come at us from that direction."

He was absolutely certain of himself. But I wondered, remembering Ahriman's ability to alter space-time and his fondness for darkness and the deep.

"Maybe we ought to place a sensor there, just in case," I said. "You're probably right, but if they do find a way to get at us from down there, it'd be better if we had a warning, don't you think?"

We had pushed the weapon as far as Kedar's line of green power packs. Ogun grimaced as he straightened up and let Kedar take up the cannon's heavy cables and plug them into two of the green cylinders.

"I'm the armorer, not the commander. I'm not supposed to think. I just take care of the weapons and follow orders." He stretched his heavily muscled arms toward the rugged ceiling of the cave. "Besides, if they find a way to come at us from down there, we're cooked, no matter how much of a warning we get."

Kedar shot him an inquisitive glance.

"He wants to put a warning sensor down by the well," Ogun explained. "Just in case."

The power specialist turned his gaze to me, and for the flash of an instant I thought I might have been looking at Dal, shaved clean of his red beard.

"I'll ask the commander about that," he said. "It might be a reasonable thing to do."

"Reasonable." Ogun mumbled and muttered to himself.

The three of us pushed the cannon up to the mouth of the cave. The other soldiers had left a cleared space for it, and now they busily began lifting loose rocks and planting them in front of the heavy weapon to form a rough sort of protective wall. I helped them, while Ogun and Kedar ran their checks on the equipment.

I found myself hauling rocks with Marek. We made an effective team, although I suspect I did most of the real work. He grinned at me as we sweated away at it, and cocked his head toward Ogun and Kedar.

"Officers," he whispered.

I almost laughed. It was the same in all armies, in all organizations. Some worked with their muscles; some worked with their brains.

And there was always one who directed them all. With us, it was Adena.

"The wind's dying down," she called out to us. She was standing a few yards out in front of the cave's mouth, fully armored and helmeted, but with her visor up, off her face.

I looked up and saw that the snow had stopped. It was knee-high just outside the cave, where she stood, but farther off, outside the lee of the cliff, it had drifted many feet deep. The gray clouds were scudding along the sky, as if hurrying to get away from the carnage that was to come.

"The sun will break through soon," Adena said, almost cheerfully. "We'll have a blue sky to fight under."

The soldiers stirred and tinkered with their weapons. Pure instinct, I thought, produced by merciless training.

Ogun gave me a rapid run-through on the workings of the heavy cannon. It was an energy-beam weapon, an extremely powerful kind of laser that made the fusion-laboratory lasers I had known in the twentieth century seem like children's toys.

I wondered, as we crouched behind the massive gun, how these people and their advanced weaponry could have been brought into the Ice Age. I knew that Ormazd could play with time and space at will. So could Ahriman. But, for the first time since I had arrived at this bewildering place, I wondered how humans could exist in what must have been the Pleistocene Epoch, a hundred thousand years before the pyramids were erected in Egypt, with such sophisticated technology. There was no archeological record of it in later centuries.

And who was our enemy? Who were these creatures we were fighting against? The brutes. Ahriman's people. Where had they come from? Why were they here on planet Earth?

There was much that I did not yet know, Adena had told me. And she had said that I would not be pleased with the knowledge, once it was revealed to me.

Was this little band of human beings part of an army that Ormazd had sent back to the Ice Age from some distant future era? Had he sent us here to drive out the brutes, the invaders who were trying to destroy the human race? But Marek had spoken about command ships in orbit. Why would the commanders of this army be in ships orbiting the Earth? Why not in cities or command posts in their native lands?

A horrifying thought struck me. What if we are the invaders? And the brutes—Ahriman's people—are the ones defending their homes against us?

I almost cried out aloud with the pain of that idea. But my thoughts were stifled by Adena's calm announcement: "Prime your weapons. Here they come."