Vengeance of Orion [Mass Market Paperback]

Ben Bova (Author)

Book Description

Series: Orion | Publication Date: February 1989

Orion finds himself thrust back to the ancient world of Greece and must prevent the Greek army from destroying the citadel of Troy. If he fails, he will lose the only woman he has ever loved. But if he succeeds, the history of the world will be changed forever. The stunning sequel to Orion.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Born in Philadelphia, Ben Bova worked as a newspaper reporter, a technical editor for Project Vanguard (the first American satellite program), and a science writer and marketing manager for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, before being appointed editor of Analog, one of the leading science fiction magazines, in 1971. After leaving Analog in 1978, he continued his editorial work in science fiction, serving as fiction editor of Omni for several years and editing a number of anthologies and lines of books, including the "Ben Bova Presents" series for Tor. He has won science fiction's Hugo Award for Best Editor six times.

A published SF author from the late 1950s onward, Bova is one of the field's leading writers of "hard SF," science fiction based on plausible science and engineering. Among his dozens of novels are Millennium, The Kinsman Saga, Colony, Orion, Peacekeepers, Privateers, and the Voyagers series. Much of his recent work, including Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, The Precipice, and The Rock Rats, falls into the continuity he calls "The Grand Tour," a large-scale saga of the near-future exploration and development of our solar system.

A President Emeritus of the National Space Society and a past president of Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, in 2001 Dr. Bova was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He lives in Naples, Florida, with his wife, the well-known literary agent Barbara Bova.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

 

Vengeance of Orion

BOOK I

TROY

Chapter I

THE slash of a whip across my bare back brought me to full awareness. “Pull, you big ox! Stop your daydreaming or you’ll think Zeus’s thunderbolts are landing on your shoulders!”

I was sitting on a rough wooden bench along the gunwale of a long, wallowing boat, a heavy oar in my hands. No, not an oar. A paddle. We were rowing hard, under a hot high sun. I could see the sweat streaming down the emaciated ribs and spine of the man in front of me. There were welts across his nut-brown skin.

“Pull!” the man with the whip roared. “Stay with the beat.”

I wore nothing but a stained leather loincloth. Sweat stung my eyes. My back and arms ached. My hands were callused and dirty.

The boat was like a Hawaiian war canoe. The prow rose high into a grotesquely carved figurehead; some fierce demonic spirit, I guessed, to protect the boat and its crew. I glanced swiftly around as I dug my paddle into the heaving dark sea and counted forty rowers. Amidships there were bales of goods, tethered sheep and pigs that squealed with every roll of the deck.

The sun blazed overhead. The wind was fitful and light. The boat’s only sail was furled against its mast. I could smell the stench of the animals’ droppings. Toward the stern a brawny bald man was beating a single large mallet on a well-worn drum, as steady as a metronome. We drove our paddles into the water in time with his beat—or took a sting from the rowing master’s whip.

Other men were gathered down by the stern, standing, shading their eyes with one hand and pointing with the other as they spoke with one another. They wore clean knee-length linen tunics and cloaks of red or blue that went down to midcalf. Small daggers at their belts, more for ornamentation than combat, I judged. Silver inlaid hilts. Gold clasps on their cloaks. They were young men, lean, their beards light. But their faces were grave, not jaunty. They were looking toward something that sobered their youthful spirits. I followed their gaze and saw a headland not far off, a low treeless rocky rise at the end of a sandy stretch of beach. Obviously our destination was beyond that promontory.

Where was I? How did I get here? Frantically I ransacked my mind. The last firm memory I could find was of a beautiful, tall, gray-eyed woman who loved me and whom I loved. We were … a shudder of blackest grief surged through me. She was dead.

My mind went spinning, as if a whirlpool had opened in the dark sea and dragged me down into it. Dead. Yes. There was a ship, a very different ship. One that traveled not through the water but through the vast emptiness between stars. I had been on that ship with her. And it exploded. She died. She was killed. We were both killed.

Yet I lived, sweaty, dirty, my back stinging with welts, on this strangely primitive oversized canoe heading for an unknown land under a brazen cloudless sky.

Who am I? With a sudden shock of fright I realized that I could remember nothing about myself except my name. I am Orion, I told myself. But more than that I could not recall. My memory was a blank, as if it had been wiped clean, like a classroom chalkboard being prepared for a new lesson.

I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to think about that woman I had loved and that fantastic star-leaping ship. I could not even remember her name. I saw flames, heard screams. I held her in my arms as the heat blistered our skins and made the metal walls around us glow hell-red.

“He’s beaten us, Orion,” she said to me. “We’ll die together. That’s the only consolation we will have, my love.”

I remembered pain. Not merely the agony of flesh searing and splitting open, steaming and cooking even as our eyes were burned away, but the torture of being torn apart forever from the one woman in all the universes whom I loved.

The whip cracked against my bare back again.

“Harder! Pull harder, you whoreson, or by the gods I’ll sacrifice you instead of a bullock once we make landfall!”

He leaned over me, his scarred face red with anger, and slashed at me again with the whip. The pain of the lash was nothing. I closed it off without another thought. I always could control my body completely. Had I wanted to, I could have snapped this hefty paddle in two and driven the ragged end of it through the whipmaster’s thick skull. But what was the sting of his whip compared to the agony of death, the hopelessness of loss?

We rowed around the rocky headland and saw a calm sheltered inlet. Spread along the curving beach were dozens of ships like our own, pulled far up on the sand. Huts and tents huddled among their black hulls like shreds of paper littering a city street after a parade. Thin gray smoke issued from cook fires here and there. A pall of thicker, blacker smoke billowed off in the distance.

A mile or so inland, up on a bluff that commanded the beach, stood a city or citadel of some sort. High stone walls with square towers rising above the battlements. Far in the distance, dark wooded hills rose and gradually gave way to mountains that floated shimmering in the blue heat haze.

The young men at the stern seemed to get tenser at the sight of the walled city. Their voices were low, but I heard them easily enough.

“There is it,” one of them said to his companions. His voice was grim.

The youth next to him nodded and spoke a single word.

“Troy.”

Copyright © 1988 by Ben Bova

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books (February 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0812531612
• ISBN-13: 978-0812531619
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #804,906 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Orion the Hunter vs the Golden One, June 15, 2000

By 

Joe White (Layton, Utah United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vengeance of Orion (Mass Market Paperback)

Interesting book. The main character, Orion, was created by powerful god-like human beings from the far future. Orion is a tool of these god-like beings, specifically, one that Orion calls the Golden One (aka Apollo). Orion is tired of being a pawn, he wants to forge his own destiny and choose his own life but the Golden One won't stand for it. It's any interesting novel as Orion tries to thwart the Golden One's plans of rewriting history during the Trojan War. Orion doesn't do this out of a sense of right or wrong (even though he is a generally good guy) or to fix the timeline. Orion does this to hurt the Golden One because Orion is tired of being used, he wants his freedom.

Vengeance of Orion indeed.

I like this book because we see a character resisting fate and destiny. Even though this is science fiction, I do get tired of fantasy characters accepting their fate as they are drawn into a destiny they MUST fulfill. Vengeance of Orion is refreshing.

Note: This is the second in the Orion series. Orion was the first novel and Vengeance is followed by Orion in the Dying Time. There are five books in this series thus far but, as of this writing, I've only read the first three. Good stuff.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exciting combination of ancient myth, and science fiction., December 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Vengeance of Orion (Mass Market Paperback)

Sent back in time, to the Trojan War, Orion must fight against great odds to gain the respect of the Achains, and the Creators. The Golden One sends many hurdles for Orion to climb over. Athene is the one thing that keeps Orion from giving up.

4.0 out of 5 stars Super Reader, August 4, 2007

By 

Blue Tyson "- Research Finished" (Legion clubhouse) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vengeance of Orion (Mass Market Paperback)

In the second Orion book Orion gets to do the way back in the past thing quite a bit. More specifically, in Troy with the Greeks, and also in ancient Egypt.

Throughout this he is getting a bit tired of being a super-pawn, but this does not really please his Light Side overseer, you could say.