"Yes, sir sir," Rena said, snapping her hand to her brow in a military salute I thought there was just enough emphasis on the sir sir to make it slightly mocking. to make it slightly mocking.

She pointed me farther back in the cave, where stacks of plastic cartons stood lined in neat rows. "Clothes in here." She yanked open the side of one carton and I saw a pile of gray coveralls. "Helmets and equipment in those rows back there. Help yourself. One size fits all."

I took a pair of the coveralls from the bin. They looked much too small for me as I held them in my outstretched hands. But I shrugged and tried them on. They seemed to mold themselves to my body, stretching as necessary to fit comfortably without being too snug.

Rena peeled the blank nameplate from the chest of my uniform and took a light pen from her pocket.

"Orion," she said, tracing my name onto the fabric. As she handed it back to me, she whispered, "Be careful of Kedar. Just because he's a power tech he thinks he's above the rest of us."

I nodded my thanks and slapped the nameplate back where it belonged, just above my uniform's breast pocket. Then we went shopping for a new suit of the white plastic armor that Rena said they all wore outside the cave. And a helmet.

I felt a little like the squire to a medieval knight, carrying a double armload of armor and equipment as I followed Rena back toward the front of the cave.

Kedar intercepted us. "Well, at least you're properly outfitted," he said, eying me up and down. "Come on, Adena wants to ask you a few questions."

For an awkward moment I stood there, my arms full, not quite knowing what to do. Rena solved my problem by taking the stuff I was carrying. She could barely peep over the top of it once I had loaded it all on her. But she gave me a friendly wink as she staggered off toward the area where the cots were.

Kedar led me to the desk where the others had been clustered before. A woman stood at it, her back to me, bent slightly over the desk as she studied a map displayed on her video screen.

"Here he is, Adena," said Kedar.

She turned, and the breath caught in my throat. It was she. As young and vibrantly beautiful as I had first seen her, so many long ages ago. Her hair was cropped short now, shorter even than mine. But it was thick and shining black, curling around her ears and across her brow. Her eyes were the same profound gray, warm and deep and knowing.

She flicked a glance at the name stenciled on my breast.

"Orion?" Even her voice was the same rich resonance.

I nodded. "And you are Adena." The insignia on her shoulder was a clenched fist.

"What are you doing in this sector? What unit are you with?"

"I don't know," I answered. "I found myself lost in the blizzard out there. I can't remember anything further back than a few hours ago." Unless you want to count other ages, other lifetimes, I added silently.

She frowned at me.

Kedar said, "Obviously he's not from the transport team."

"Obviously not," Adena replied. Looking back at me, she asked, "What's your specialty?"

I had no answer.

"Biowar? Chemicals? Energy weapons? Power? Communications?" Her voice rose slightly as I stood there mute and befuddled.

"You've got to have some some specialty, soldier," Kedar snapped. specialty, soldier," Kedar snapped.

"I'm on a special assignment," I heard myself reply. "I'm an assassin."

"A what?" Kedar glanced at Adena, his brows arching almost up into his scalp line.

"My assignment is to find Ahriman and kill him," I said.

"Ahriman? Who in the name of the twenty devils of the night is Ahriman?"

Adena's voice was softer. "There's no one in this unit by that name."

"Ahriman's not one of us," I said. "He's a different kind of creature, intelligent but not truly human, dark and powerful..." I described the Dark One as closely as I could.

Their faces grew more surprised and nonplussed with each word I spoke.

When I stopped, Adena said, "And your special assignment is to find this person and kill him?"

"Yes. That's why I was sent here."

"By whom?"

"Ormazd," I said.

They looked at each other. The name obviously meant nothing to them.

"Do you know of Ahriman, the Dark One?" I asked. "Do you know where I can find him?"

Kedar's expression turned into a bitter smirk. "Just stay here for another day, Orion. As soon as this blizzard ends, you'll see more men like the one you described than you'll ever want to see in your entire life."

"I don't understand."

"Don't you know that we're at war with them?" Adena asked.

"War? With... with whom?"

"The man you described," she said. "This whole planet was covered with people such as he. We're here to eliminate them."

"But we're cut off from our other units," Kedar added before I could draw a breath. "They're gathering out there in the snow-hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. They're going to attack as soon as the storm stops. They're going to eliminate us."

But his despairing words barely registered on my attention. Within me, my mind was racing. The War! This must be The War!

CHAPTER 35.

Adena and Kedar soon turned me loose. There was not much they could do with a man who was obviously either insane from battle or feigning insanity to avoid battle. They turned their attention to defending the cave against the attack that they knew was coming as soon as the storm died down.

I made my way to the mouth of the cave, feeling the eyes of the other soldiers on my back. The wind still raged out there, bitterly cold. I shivered and retreated back to the warmth of the radiant heaters.

Rena took me in tow once again and led me to a small circle of men and women who were heating prepackaged meals in what looked to me like a portable microwave oven. We ate in gloomy silence. One by one, the soldiers got up and went back to the ridiculous floating cots, where they grimly checked out their weapons.

The only halfway-cheerful person in the squad was a youngish man who introduced himself as Marek, communications specialist. He showed me the portable consoles and screens that were his responsibility.

"The brutes are jamming all our outgoing transmissions, somehow," he said in a pleasant voice, almost as if he were describing how the equipment worked. "I don't know how they do it, but they're doing it damned well."

"The brutes?" I asked.

Nodding, he replied, "The enemy, the guys with the gray skins and red eyes." He hunched forward, pulling his neck down and raising his shoulders, then shuffled a few steps, scowling as mightily as he could. For a slim human youngster it was a fairly good imitation of the one I knew as Ahriman; "Anyway," Marek went on, relaxing again, "they're jamming our outgoing calls, so we can't tell the commanders up in the orbiting ships where we are or what we're up against."

"We're cut off," I said.

He bobbed his head again, seemingly as unconcerned as a man who faced nothing worse than an annoying equipment breakdown.

"We're getting most of the incoming transmissions. The orders from Up Top-" he jabbed a finger toward the ceiling of the cave-"are reaching us just fine. And the weather maps. And the multispectral scans that show us where the brutes are massing their forces."

He pointed to a video screen and tapped a few pads on its keyboard. The screen glowed to life, showing me a wild, sweeping circle of clouds, a gigantic cyclonic storm as seen from the cameras of an orbiting satellite.

"That's us, that spot where the cursor is." Marek tapped a flickering green dot on the lower left comer of the screen.

I could feel my eyes widening as I stared at the picture. The storm clouds covered about half the screen, but where the ground was clear, I could make out geography that looked tantalizingly familiar. A long peninsula jutted out into a large sea; it looked to me like Italy, except that the shape was subtly wrong and the "toe" of what I remembered as the Italian boot was definitely connected to what would someday be the island of Sicily. Above that one recognizable shape the ground was a featureless expanse of white. Glaciers covered most of Europe. This was truly the Ice Age.

Marek prodded me. "Seen enough? Ready for the bad news?"

I nodded.

He tapped at the keyboard again and the storm clouds disappeared from the screen, showing the ground-or rather the ice fields-beneath them. The view seemed to zoom down closer to the surface, until I could make out a few gray peaks of granite jutting above the snow.

"That's our cave," he said, gesturing at the flickering cursor again. "And here-" he touched a single key-"are the brutes."

A forest of red dots sprang up against the whiteness of the ice and snow. There must have been at least a thousand of them, arranged in a ragged semicircle that faced our cave.

So we were cut off from the rest of our own forces and hugely outnumbered as we waited for the enemy-the brutes-to attack.

Young as they seemed to be, the soldiers around me were veterans of many battles. They wasted no time in worrying. They ate; they checked their weapons, and soon enough they began to stretch out on their wobbly cots and go to sleep.

"Might as well grab some sleep while you can," Marek told me, as pleasantly as if he had not a worry in the world. "The storm won't let up for another six hours, and the brutes won't attack until it does."

"Are you sure?"

His grin changed only slightly. "How long have we been fighting them? Have you ever known them to attack during a storm like this?"

I shrugged.

"Besides, we've got the field out there covered with scanners. When they start to make their move, we'll have plenty of warning."

But I noticed that he stayed by his equipment, fiddling with it, checking it over, searching for a way to break through the jamming and tell the commanders in orbit where we were and what we faced.

I saw Adena standing alone up by the entrance to the cave, already dressed in armor, her helmet masking her lustrous dark hair. Most of the others were either asleep or pretending to be. The cave was quiet except for the hum of electrical equipment and the louder, more ominous moaning of the storm wind outside.

Kedar was crouched beside a set of squat, heavy green cylinders. From the cryptic lettering stenciled on them, I knew they were the electrical power packs that supplied the energy to run the squad's equipment. He cast a suspicious glance at me as I walked slowly toward Adena, but he said nothing and remained where he was, checking his power packs. Before I could say anything to her, Adena spoke to me. "You'd better get some rest."

"I don't need much sleep," I replied. "I'm all right now."

"Waiting is the worst part," she said, her eyes peering out at the wind-driven snow. "If I had more troops, I'd go out now and attack them now, while they're still getting themselves ready."

"You don't remember me?" I asked.

She turned to face me, her gray eyes troubled. "Should I? Have we met before?"

"Many times."

"No." She shook her helmeted head. "I would recall it if we had. And yet..."

"And yet I look familiar to you."

"Yes," she admitted.

"Think," I urged her, feeling a burning intensity blazing inside me. "We have have met before. Long ago-in the future." met before. Long ago-in the future."

"The future?"

"A primitive hunting tribe, in the springtime that will follow this age of winter. The capital of a barbarian empire, thousands of years afterward. A giant metropolis, centuries later..."

She looked startled, troubled. "You're insane," she whispered. "Battle fatigue, or the shock of exposure to the storm."

"Think!" I insisted. "Close your eyes and see what comes into your mind when you think of me."

She gave me an odd look, part disbelief, part distrust. But slowly she squeezed her eyes shut, and I concentrated with every ounce of my will power.

"What do you see?" I asked her.

For long moments she did not respond. Then: "A waterfall."

"What else?"

"Nothing... trees, a few people... and... strange animals, four legs... I'm riding on its back... and... you! you! You're riding next to me..." You're riding next to me..."

"Go on."

"One of the brutes. A big one. In a cave... No, it's some kind of tunnel..." She gasped and her eyes flicked wide open.

"The rats," I realized.

Adena's trembling hands reached up toward her throat. "It's horrible... they... they..."

"We both died in that era," I said. "We have lived many lives, you and I."

"Who are you?"

"I am Orion, the Hunter. I seek Ahriman, the Dark One, the one who turned the rats on you. I have been sent to all those different ages to find him, and kill him."