The Empty Warrior

by J. D. McCartney

  He was sure that both members of his current crew privately considered him to be arrogant in the extreme, but neither would venture to say so out loud because he was a pilot—their pilot, one of the best in the business—and their lives were in his hands. They stayed below decks at their stations, did what they were there to do, and didn’t impinge on his privacy.

  So Lindy was alone and took the communication himself when the warning came in. Three Vazilek ships had entered the system, with one vectoring directly toward the aberrant world above which Talon was now suspended. Lindy’s first thought was that neither the Talon nor the Albatross were armed, hardly the perfect scenario with a raider inbound. Within seconds he was on the line with Deckar. “You get the news?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Deckar replied, apparently unruffled. “I’ve got everybody double-timing it now, so we should be okay. I’ll be off this rock in seven minutes, tops. After that I think we should stay atmospheric, use what weather we can find for cover and try to keep the planet between us and them until the ship is close enough for us to make a run for it.”

  “I agree. But I’m going to stay here on station until you get airborne. So hurry. I don’t want to get cooked over nothing more than the literature stolen from an insane asylum.”

  “Neither do I, brother; believe me.” With that, Deckar signed off.

  Lindy was no longer entertained by the lightning splitting the clouds. He was too worried to even think of the storm now. He made a quick announcement to his meager crew over the ship’s intercom, explaining the situation, and then fidgeted nervously at the controls while ignoring the clamor exploding outside. Five minutes came and went. Two minutes after that Deckar had still not checked in. Lindy waited another anxious sixty seconds before opening a com link.

  “Are you leaving or not?” he asked.

  “We’ve a problem Willet.” Deckar’s tone was dead serious, and every muscle in Lindy’s body stiffened at the gravity in his voice.

  “What kind of a problem?”

  “An injury. A bad one. We’re loading her aboard now. We’ll be up in a minute.”

  “Should I come down?”

  “No. By the time you get here, we’ll be gone. And if I were you, I’d be on the move. That Vazilek has got to be closing in.”

  “No kidding. But I’ll wait for you.”

  And wait Lindy did. He waited until he could wait no more. He waited until the sensors on the cutter, which had a limited range under the best of circumstances but were absolutely constricted by the interference from the storm, picked up the Vazilek ship approaching. “Deckar,” he nearly screamed into the com. “They’re here! I’m tracking them now. Get that bird off the ground!”

  “I’ve got one man still out,” Deckar replied. There was a momentary pause before he spoke again. “Okay, he’s aboard. And we’re flying. I’ll see you back at the ship.”

  You better firewall those engines, Deckar, Lindy thought. The Vazilek ship was close, close enough that Lindy could raise a visual on his panel. He watched as the raider streaked through the atmosphere directly toward Deckar and the Albatross, paying no attention to Lindy’s craft. Whether that meant they could not detect him hiding in the storm or that they simply did not care about his presence he did not know, but he made no attempt to flee.

  The Vazileks’ entry angle was steep, steep enough to make the leading edges of the ship’s stubby wings glow fluorescently in the night. Safety was apparently of secondary concern to them when compared with destroying the barge. They were on top of Deckar in seconds. The Albatross had only a few moments before begun to fall away from the surface on its antigravs. The mains had hardly engaged when the Vazileks fired their plasma cannon. A fearsome ball of power lit the darkness, followed immediately by a tremendous explosion as the barge disintegrated. The raider swept away in a smooth upward arc, heading for space, and Vigilant.

  Lindy clamped his eyes shut to keep out the sight of the flaming debris that had a moment before been Albatross. When he opened them there were only bits of spinning fire in the night, spiraling toward the ground below. Despair wracked his heart and he hugged himself tightly with both arms, but still he made no move to leave the clouds. He kept Talon hovering in the center of the storm, waiting until the Vazilek ship was well out of the atmosphere before acting. When he thought they were far enough out and could see they were accelerating away he opened the intercom again.

  “Buckle up, boys,” he said. “Deckar just bought it. We’re going in to search for survivors.” With that he cut the antigravs, engaged the engines, and pushed the cutter over into a powered dive toward the surface. The dampening systems, as good as they were, had never been designed for such maneuvers and the G forces pressed Lindy heavily back into his seat. Talon screamed downward through the base of the clouds, into the pounding rain and then out of it, braking only at the last possible moment to come to a slow glide only feet above the mountain lake that had been the rendezvous point.

  “What have you got..,” Lindy paused, searching his mind for a name, and abruptly finding it. “Rast?”

  The med tech was slow to answer. Having been convinced that Lindy was either going to fly the cutter into the ground or tear off her wings, he was still coming to grips with the reality that he yet lived.

  “Scanning,” was the only word he could muster, but the truth was that he was only now activating his equipment. However, Rast was fairly good at his job and recovered quickly. In seconds he was deftly searching the area for any sign of life, or even an intact cranium that could be kept in stasis until they were home, until a new body could be either shipped in or grown for the casualty.

  “Got one,” he finally said. “Floating on the water. A couple of hundred meters abaft. Transferring coordinates. It looks like the rest of them are all gone though.”

  Lindy’s eyes flitted to the monitor that would show him exactly where the survivor was. Almost as soon as his focus settled on the screen, a red dot appeared behind the yellow outline that symbolized Talon. He brought the trim craft about and expertly maneuvered it over the water until the rear hatch was just to the left of the survivor, with Talon’s hull hanging less than a meter above the surface of the lake. He punched up a visual. What appeared to be a man hung sideways in the water, kept afloat by a mangled mass of half melted foam and burnt orange fabric that had somehow become entwined around his right shoulder and armpit. A warning light appeared on the instrument panel, indicating that the hatch had been opened. Below, Rast flipped a switch and a ladder extended from the hatch to a point where its lower rungs were beneath the water. Lindy could see the base of it in his visual.

  “I don’t think he’s one of ours,” Rast said several seconds later. But even over the com link his voice sounded uncertain.

  “What do you mean?” Lindy asked, perplexed. “Who else would he be?”

  “Well, my guess is he’s an Earther. He appears to be completely intact, but I’m still not getting a transponder signal. And I mean no signal at all. I’m knee deep in the water here with the receiver six inches from this guy’s back, and I’m getting nothing. What should I do?” he asked woefully.

  “Get him aboard,” Lindy snapped, thinking the answer should have been obvious. “I’m coming down.” He set Talon for station keeping before spinning in his chair and standing in movements that were as fluid as the lope of a cheetah. His act of rising segued into an easy jog that took him to the rear of the flight deck where the access hatch recognized him and slid aside at his approach. He was down the short stairwell, through the crew’s quarters, and into the payload bay in a matter of seconds. Rast and the p-spec were still struggling to pull the survivor into the bay when he arrived. Lindy reached down to help them pull the man up, but when he grabbed an arm, a fist full of charred clothing and skin came off in his hand.

  “Great blazing suns!” he cried, while the urge to puke filled the back of his throat. “He’s burned to a cinder! Is he still alive?” As Lindy spoke, the p-spec, w
ho had grasped the survivor under both arms, finally pulled him up into the cutter while Rast, who had been wedged between the man’s legs, lifted himself into the ship and sat heavily on the side of the open hatch. Water streamed from his uniform and spread over the deck around him.

  “Oh, yeah,” Rast said. “He’s alive all right. But not by much and not for long.”

  “Explain,” Lindy ordered coldly, as he wiped the gore from his hand onto the right leg of his sky blue trousers.

  “Look at him,” Rast exclaimed, with more than a little exasperation. “Look at the size of him. He’s not one of ours. He’s an aberrant!”

  Lindy did a quick scan of the scorched body that lay at his feet, and the man was large. He had to be nearly two meters in height. He was obviously not your average Akadean. “Well, he shouldn’t be any different from us internally,” the pilot said, misunderstanding the med tech’s reasoning. “Aberrants are still human. Just do the best you can for him. I’ve got to get us out of here before the Vazileks decide to put in another appearance.” He turned away and began to walk quickly back toward the flight deck.

  “Don’t you get it,” Rast nearly yelled. “There is nothing I can do for him in only a few minutes, and we can’t take him back with us; you’ve got to know that! We need to put him back where we found him.”

  Lindy stopped in his tracks, then turned slowly until his eyes met the med tech’s. The pupils within his patrician blue irises widened slightly and burned into the man from either side of his long narrow nose. “What did you say?” he asked softly, slowly.

  “Willet, we can’t,” Rast said defensively, holding his palms out before him like a supplicant. “For the love of Stirga, he’s an aberrant. We’re not even supposed to speak to these people, let alone abduct one. It’s a violation of a thousand laws. We have to leave him.”

  Lindy was mortified. He looked at Rast incredulously, his chin dropping and his mouth falling open. He had just seen forty some crew-mates burned to ash by people they had never even met. Some of the dead had been his close friends. And now, after all that, one of his own crew wanted to condemn yet another man to die, a man who could be saved, because of rules in a book, because of words written by legislators who were light years away from Talon and the wounded man that now lay on her deck.

  All he could do was slowly shake his head in disbelief. Lindy had never been one to let what he considered to be petty guidelines override his judgment, and it invariably surprised and agitated him to be confronted by those slavishly devoted to regulations. But he wasn’t one to give in either. Pressuring Lindy generally had only the effect of exacerbating his innate stubbornness. He confronted the med tech with a rhetorical question. “Can you fly this bird, Rast?” he asked with feigned innocence.

  The med tech rolled his eyes before meeting Lindy’s gaze. “You know she won’t recognize a command from me as long as you and Loble,” he jerked his head toward the p-spec whose stare bored into a nearby bulkhead and who obviously only wanted to stay out of the argument, “are on board and not incapacitated. But that is not the issue. This man is an Earther, an aberrant. He could be incredibly dangerous. We simply cannot take him back with us.” Rast spoke with an earnestness that only served to further inflame Lindy’s already seething ire.

  He responded with an indignant grimace before speaking again. “Well he doesn’t look very dangerous at the moment.” Lindy paused, just for effect, and then went on. “Now let me tell you how we are going to proceed. Whatever else he is, this man is a human being. I will not under any circumstances leave him to die now that we have found him. We can either stay here with him until it is certain that he will survive without our aid, or we can take him with us. And I dare say that staying on this planet is most unappealing, particularly as Vigilant cannot wait for us and three Vazilek raiders are running amok in this system. That being the case, I suggest we close the frigging hatch and allow me to get us out the fuck out of here!” He had been crossing the deck as he spoke, his voice rising with every word, and as he reached the end of his harangue he stood just to the side of the hatch that still hung open over the water. As the last angry word escaped his lips he forcefully punched the hatch’s control panel as if to provide an exclamation point. The ladder folded into the hull and the hatch swung upward and dogged itself shut, forcing Rast to hastily pull his dangling legs inside and lean over onto to his left elbow.

  Lindy stood over him glowering for a full five seconds before he continued. “Well,” he said with insincere jocularity, “I’m glad to see that there are no more objections. Now, if you please, get to work on our passenger and do your best to keep him alive until I can get us back aboard the ship.” With that he turned on his heel briskly enough that his long blonde and braided ponytail whipped over his shoulder and came to rest against his chest. He stalked away toward the flight deck until his anger forced him to turn and take one last dig at the med tech. “Oh, and Rast,” he said, forcing himself to use a tone of politeness that he certainly didn’t feel, “you needn’t fret. The log is in perfect working order. You can rest assured that your objections have been duly noted. The rescue of the aberrant will be my responsibility, and mine alone. Your career,” he put special emphasis on the word, “will be in no jeopardy.”

  As he resumed his path toward the cockpit, he overheard Rast sullenly ask Loble for his help in wrestling the Earther into the autodoc. Lindy could hear their grunting exertions behind him until the crew quarters hatch slid shut behind him as he passed.

  CHAPTER NINE:

  Gauntlet of Fire

  Red icons at last reappeared within the holographic plot; they had been missing for several minutes, ever since the sensors had been blinded by the ship’s swing around the far side of the system’s star. Valessanna quickly studied the positions and vectors of Vigilant’s Vazilek assailants. She wanted to know as rapidly as possible what, if anything, had changed since the last time she had seen their relative positions displayed. One Vazilek ship lay close by the aberrant world, accelerating away from it but still moving so slowly that its progress was barely perceptible. The other two were just completing the long, sweeping arc of the braking maneuver that would put them directly between the Vigilant and her objective.

  “Vigilant,” she ordered, “add small craft icons to spatial plot.” A yellow diamond, apparently the barge, appeared and looked to be still at the extraction point on the dark side of the aberrant world. Valessanna rotated the image this way and that, zoomed it in and out, but was unable to locate the cutter anywhere in the vicinity.

  “Colvan, I’m only showing Albatross on my plot. Where’s Lindy?”

  There was a long pause before Busht answered, and when he did so, he spoke mournfully, anguish encrusting his lugubrious response. “That is Lindy. The transponder on Albatross has ceased transmission.”

  Valessanna took a closer look at the tiny identification numbers that hung beneath the icon. Busht was correct; it was the Talon. She swung her chair to the right and looked the Exec in the eye. “What do you mean the transponder has ceased transmission?” she asked, knowing all the while that one of her worst fears had been realized and yet hoping against hope that somehow it wasn’t true.

  Busht stared back at her with haunted eyes. “They’re gone, Val,” he said softly. “Blown to bits, according to Lindy. I just reestablished contact with him. He says Talon is searching for survivors now.”

  Despite her dread of just such a happening, it still took a few moments for the report of so many deaths to register on Valessanna’s brain. When it did, she gazed at Busht in horror, her mind accepting his words, but her heart still unwilling to believe. At last she blinked several times and came back to herself. She rotated her command chair forward, saying nothing more to her second in command. There was nothing adequate to be said.

  “Communications,” she ordered, “get me Lindy.”

  Almost immediately the self-assured voice of the pilot echoed from her headset. “This is Talon.”
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  “Lindy”, she nearly shouted, “what in the name of the Rock is going on down there?”

  “The Albatross has been destroyed. We have picked up one survivor, and we are awaiting rendezvous with Vigilant. Stand by to take us aboard. And Captain, please make your best speed. With three Vazilek ships in the system, I feel certain that we will both be under fire before Talon is recovered. I believe our only alternative is a sweep.”

  Only Lindy would make such a foolish request, Valessanna thought. The onboard computer on Talon was not programmed to make docking maneuvers at the wildly differing velocities the two ships would be making if Vigilant blew by the planet at full acceleration. If left up to the cutter, its machine mind would simply abort the rendezvous, abandoning its crew to a fiery death at the hands of the Vazileks. Since Vigilant was going to be unable to slacken her speed with the raiders in hot pursuit, and as there was no time to totally reprogram the Talon to accept new docking parameters, the landing would have to be done entirely under manual control. Any sane pilot would have at least inquired if it were possible for Vigilant to back off her thrust a bit during the procedure, but not Lindy. Only he would demand all the speed the engines could deliver.

  It had always been Valessanna’s personal opinion that Lindy’s self-confidence sometimes stepped well over the line into recklessness, and his current request seemed a testament to his overly audacious ego. But even as captain she had very little say in such matters. He answered to her only when aboard Vigilant; once off on his own ship he operated as her counterpart, not a subordinate. As long as nothing went awry, her pilots’ actions when in control of their own craft were subject to review only by the senior pilot aboard or fleet command back in the Union—and Lindy was the senior pilot on Vigilant. Furthermore, he had never come close to cracking up a ship and had never caused injury to himself or any crew-members serving under him. If he was capable enough to back up his daring with his actions, no one, besides herself apparently, cared what he did while sitting at the controls. As far as fleet was concerned, a pilot was not overly intrepid until he got himself or someone else killed or maimed. Any flying done that stopped short of precipitating such an event, no matter how seemingly rash the maneuvers involved were, was regarded simply as the result of pilot skill. There was no such thing as luck in the eyes of the high command.