When finally he made his way past the drifting clump of enervated spacers he resumed his brisk stride and in moments was turning down the corridor that led directly to sick bay; a corridor that was supposed to have been placed off limits to everyone. He was gratified to find that it, at least, was deserted. Security had obviously taken his orders seriously, however strange those orders may have seemed.
Empty, the passageway was quiet enough that even the low swish of his pant legs abrading each other as he walked echoed off the walls and rasped in his ears. But it was only about forty meters to the entrance. He quickly traversed the distance, punched the entry console, and walked in to find two armed guards amiably chatting and laughing in the large and once again pristine waiting room. Aside from the guards, the compartment was empty save several med-techs gathered into a whispering knot in one corner.
“Hello, men,” he said as affably as he was able. “Has everything been prepared for the relocation of our guest?”
The guards turned to look at Busht, both of them evidently startled to suddenly be standing before the first officer. There was a pause as each of them waited for the other to speak, but at last one of them stammered out a sentence.
“Yes sir,” he said with a bit of uncertainty, “at least as far as we know, sir.” He stole a quick glance at his friend before returning his attention to Busht and continuing in a voice that was slightly more self-assured. “I’m told the prisoner is restrained and ready for transport. The doctor and a nurse are in with him now. They say he is anxious to see his new quarters, and they anticipate no trouble. Lieutenant Marek has informed us that the corridors en route will be cleared at your command and that the compartment has been readied. All access points to the ship’s AI in that compartment have been rendered inoperable and anything that could potentially be used as a weapon has been removed. We’re ready to proceed whenever you give the word, sir.” The man nodded slightly to signify that he was finished.
“Good,” Busht said, careful to smile slightly. “Very good.” He clapped the guard on the shoulder like he was an old friend, trying to put both of the men a little more at ease in his presence. “Be sure to express my appreciation to the lieutenant when you see him,” he continued, all the while resolving to do that very thing in person once the aberrant was moved, contingent upon the transfer going smoothly of course. He surveyed the room, his gaze lingering on the med techs still muttering amongst themselves.
“Well, let’s do this,” he said. “You’re aware of the necessary procedures, I’m sure. Why don’t you two go and very gently evict them,” he motioned to the med techs with a jerk of his thumb, “while I go collect our guest and his caretakers. In which compartment would I find the good doctor and his nurse?”
Again there was a pause as the two men silently decided who was to speak for them both. Again the same man eventually answered. “They’re down that corridor, sir,” he said, pointing through the main clinical area to one of the hallways that opened into it. “The last door on the left.”
“Thank you,” Busht replied. “I’ll be back momentarily.” He turned and entered the hallway the guard had indicated, proceeding to the proper door. But it was surprisingly not programmed to recognize him or his rank as it did not slide aside at his approach, nor did it open when he tapped an entry command onto the console to its right. Instead the voice of Dr. Beccassit issued from the control panel.
“Is that you, Mr. Busht?”
“Yes it is, doctor,” the exec replied and was rewarded by seeing the door slide into the bulkhead to his right, finally admitting him to the compartment. Inside with the doctor were the aberrant and a female nurse he was sure he had seen before, but could not remember where or when. Even her name was a mystery, but for some reason he vaguely associated her face with the captain.
Immediately Beccassit sprang up from the stool were he sat and walked toward Busht, his hand outstretched. An oversized smile appeared from within his whiskers. “So good to see you, Colvan,” he said in a voice that sounded completely genuine.
Busht did not know the doctor well; this being his one and only cruise on Vigilant, and never knew quite what to make of him. His overly casual demeanor, the balding head, and those ridiculous spectacles he wore for reading, all were bright red flags that screamed to Busht that the doctor was not what he seemed but was instead someone who for reasons unknown had chosen to disguise his true self. Every time he saw Beccassit a pin-prick of mistrust was left twinging in his naturally suspicious policeman’s mind. He could not put his finger on precisely what it was that fueled his disquiet, but somehow it seemed that there was something a little too much out of kilter about the man for it to be labeled simple eccentricity, something about him that never sat quite exactly right with Busht.
But the doctor was, according to all the information that the exec had been able to ferret out about the man, some sort of highbrow, profoundly intellectual egghead who was obviously well respected by his peers. He had, after all, been the one chosen to accompany Vigilant to the aberrant world. There could not be too awfully much wrong with him. And he did have quite a genial and engaging personality. So despite the misgivings the doctor’s demeanor always engendered, Busht found that he could not keep himself from experiencing real amity for him. It seemed strange to the exec to feel friendship for someone he did not implicitly trust, but the doctor’s boundless and energetic good nature, regardless of how honest or how false it was in actuality, was irresistibly infectious to Busht’s natural state of introversion. He could not stop himself; he genuinely liked Beccassit even though he did not feel that he should.
He took the doctor’s hand and shook it firmly. “It is good to see you as well, Dr. Beccassit,” he said, his words actually matching his feelings, for once.
Beccassit drew his hand back from Busht’s and waved it in the air in front of him in a dismissive gesture, harrumphing softly as he did so. “My name is Merco, Colvan, not Doctor,” he said matter of factly. “I do so despise titles, especially among friends.” His smile instantly returned. “Allow me to introduce you. Do you know Kira?”
Busht shook his head, inexplicably embarrassed by his near total lack of familiarity with a crew member. After all, it wasn’t as if this was an unusual occurrence. There were fifteen hundred people on board, and crew rotations were commonplace at nearly every port of call. No one knew everyone, particularly those on different watches or in different departments. Nevertheless, he found his lack of knowledge to be an imperfection, and it had pushed a sliver of guilt into his mind.
“This is Kira Pellotte. She is the case nurse for our guest,” the doctor said. The woman said hello to Busht in a deferential way and the exec nodded to her in return but kept his distance, as was customary for him with all female crew members.
“Ah yes, Pellotte. That rings a bell. I remember your name from the personnel files,” Busht lied. “I hope you have recovered fully from our misadventure with the Vazileks.” Pellotte assured him that she had, but what else would she tell the ship’s first officer. The woman might well be a mere child still frightened to death since in truth Busht had never laid eyes on her file and had no idea how old or experienced she was; she might have been twenty four or four hundred and two. He quickly added the perusal of her record to his mental “to do” list. He thought it a wise precaution in any case as the woman would be caring for the aberrant and thus interacting with him on a daily basis, and Busht wanted to know everything about anyone who had anything to do with the barbarian.
No sooner was the introduction complete when Beccassit grabbed the exec by the upper arm, an action that made him flinch slightly as he found it a much too familiar gesture. But he did not protest in any other way and allowed himself to be led across the room to a gurney that floated about a meter above the deck. The aberrant lay atop it, covered by a sheet and a blanket, unable to move due to the action of a neural inhibitor. Val had been very specific about using the incapacitating device during the transfer.
“And this is our guest of honor,” Beccassit said enthusiastically. “Hill O’Keefe, meet Colvan Busht, our ship’s first officer.”
Busht looked down, straight into the eyes of a killer. Those eyes were blue and piercing, made even more so by the pale flesh that surrounded them. They rested on either side of a hawkish nose and beneath a shock of jet black hair. The aberrant stared back at him, unyielding, as if even an exchange of gazes were a competition of some kind. Busht greeted the man without dropping his eyes and the aberrant responded in kind, but did so while still staring coldly up at him. The aberrant didn’t so much as a blink during the entirety of the exchange.
“Hello,” he had said slowly, “I’d shake your hand too, but oops, what do you know, it seems I can’t move my arm.” A small, wry smile had appeared on his face, the outward friendliness of the expression belied by the stare that continued to bore into Busht’s skull.
At last the exec had to look away, suddenly ashamed, but unnecessarily so, he felt. The aberrant was almost certainly a cold-blooded murderer. Surely he did not expect to move about the ship unfettered in any way.
“Well,” Busht managed to say somewhat good-naturedly, “you’ll be up and about soon enough. And to that end,” he continued, speaking to all three people in the room, “let’s get on with this.”
He motioned for the others to precede him, and the doctor took the lead, grabbing one of the arch-like handles that protruded from either end of the aberrant’s gurney and pulling the barbarian toward the exit. Pellotte took the other handle and, following behind Beccassit, assisted him in deftly maneuvering the aberrant out of the compartment. Busht followed, staying several paces behind. When they reached the anteroom, the doctor and nurse halted while he made his way around them and approached the guards.
“Lead the way,” he said to one, while holding the other back by his elbow, then settling him in behind Pellotte. Busht was certain nothing would go wrong, but hard experience had taught him to always make every attempt to be prepared for that which conventional wisdom said could not happen.
The group walked quietly through the corridors of the ship, their footsteps muffled by the thin blue pad that passed for carpet on board and that covered all the common areas. Using a lift would have been quicker, but putting a portion of the system off limits would have been a greater inconvenience to the crew, and caused more of a stir than simply shutting down a few passageways. And besides, Busht had no desire to be caught in any confined spaces with the barbarian, neural inhibitor or not.
The only words spoken along the way came from Beccassit, naturally, as he was almost never silent. He prattled on incessantly to the aberrant in a low voice, elucidating any number of banal subjects as they walked along. Busht was not so far back from the group that he could miss many words, and what he was hearing seemed extraordinarily mundane. Nevertheless he questioned the astuteness of imparting any unnecessary information whatsoever to an aberrant. He was sorely tempted to issue a command for silence but balanced the desire for quiet with a reminder to himself of how badly Beccassit responded to authority. In the end he decided it was hardly worth the trouble and the doctor babbled on.
The procession reached a little-used corridor just beneath the gun deck that ran nearly the length of Vigilant. There they turned left, toward the bow. They walked straight down the white-sided tunnel, pausing every fifteen meters or so when the lead guard reached a bulkhead door that needed to be opened. Under normal circumstances, their progress would not have been impeded in such a way; the doors would have all been hidden away in their storage slots, and one’s line of sight would be unobstructed save for a slight left to right bend in the corridor caused by the curvature of the hull. But with the ship as damaged as it was Busht imagined that Arkhus would be sure to keep all the airtight doors shut until Vigilant was safely ensconced in a shipyard back in the Union.
Shortly, they stopped again, as again they waited for a hatch to be opened. A blast of powerful sizzling sounds accompanied by several metallic clanks flooded out into the corridor as the hatch slid aside. Ahead the passageway was darker, the lighting in the section before them obviously still not completely repaired, and there was only naked plating for a floor. Jagged gashes across the wall and ceiling marked where Vazilek weapons had stung Vigilant. The stink of molten welds filled the air. There were several robots at work just ahead, adhering metallic bandages over the abhorrently blackened wounds the ship had suffered. Sparks flew in torrents from where they worked, the scorching light they cast reflecting garishly off the burnished areas already repaired.
The first obstacle in the humans’ path was a large delivery robot, which was little more than a polymerized cart with a computer brain and a motor drive. It was half filled with composite plating. The aberrant’s entourage slowly and carefully made their way past it. Farther along was a tall repair bot; the model was dubbed an arachnoid throughout the fleet because its many arms and columnar body rested on a base of eight spider-like legs. It stopped its work, as it was programmed to do, to let the humans pass. At its feet were two general mission robots, machines that looked like rolling half eggs with extendable arms installed through their shells. They scooted closer to the bulkhead and out of the way, doing so without losing their vise-like grip on a sheet of plating that they held up over one of the ragged rents in the corridor wall. As soon as Busht and the guard bringing up the rear had passed, the repair robot’s lasers reignited and it went back to its task of welding the plating into place.
Further along the corridor the group passed through several more areas similarly damaged that were also in various stages of repair before turning left into a passageway that took them deeper into the center of the vessel and away from its outer skin. They crossed two intersecting corridors before turning right into a third. Ten meters ahead Busht could see two guards standing before an open doorway. He halted the others in the group and approached them alone.
“Good job guys,” he said. “I think I can take it from here though, so why don’t you two go take a break for an hour before you get back to your regular duties. But before you do, tell Lieutenant Marek that the corridors can be reopened to foot traffic, if you please.”
“Yes sir,” the two replied in eager unison.
“Thank you, men,” Busht said, as the duo strode quickly away in the opposite direction from the aberrant and his escorts. Busht then motioned Beccassit and company forward and turned to enter the compartment. What he saw inside left him momentarily stunned.
Along the way, he had merely been following the lead of Beccassit and the guards, and had not paid altogether too much attention to exactly where on the ship they were headed, leaving him unprepared for the sight that met his eyes. This was not a crewman’s berth or even an officer’s quarters. This was a stateroom, one of those reserved for visiting dignitaries. Busht stood in a living area that had to be nearly a hundred square meters. This room alone was easily more than twice the size of his own quarters. Thick, spongy, burgundy colored carpet covered the floor. Atop the carpet were two overstuffed armchairs placed facing each other over the length of an ebony cocktail table that rested in front of a long, plush sofa. Two matching end tables sat at either end of the divan, while the whole arrangement faced a faux fireplace built into the bulkhead. The upholstery was luxuriously covered in a thick, ivory-colored fabric with an intricate, filigreed pattern embroidered into it with golden thread. Despite the space taken up by the furnishings, there was still plenty of room for a large weight machine and a treadmill placed behind the sofa.
A long dining table of dark wood; Busht thought it either mahogany or wainlock; and eight chairs dominated the back of the main area, while beyond that was a extravagantly appointed and fully equipped kitchen, separated from the main room by a marble topped counter that protruded from the left wall and blocked approximately three quarters of the width of the compartment. Lined across the front of that counter were four high-backed stools carved from ebony and topped by thick cus
hions that matched the sofa and chairs. Original artworks of the highest caliber were hung tastefully on each cream-colored wall.
Busht did not have to venture into the bedroom and bath area, which lay beyond a door to his right, to know that it was outfitted in much the same manner. He had escorted police commissioners, prominent politicians, and ambassadors to quarters like this one often enough in the past. Each time he had done so he had enviously wondered what it would be like to spend a cruise sleeping in the soft, sumptuous bed that he knew rested in the other room of the suite.
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and knew the rest of the company had entered the stateroom through the doorway behind him.
“Well, Mr. O’Keefe,” he mused aloud, “apparently you rate high on this vessel’s list of guests.” He found it impossible to keep the contempt from of his voice as he spoke the word guests. “Your new quarters are the best we have to offer.” And yet you are nothing more than a violent criminal, he added to himself. “How does this happen?”
Before the aberrant could speak Beccassit answered for him. “Captain Nelkris is responsible for Hill’s living arrangements, Colvan. I would have preferred to keep him in sick bay, but she insisted that he be kept apart from the crew, at least in the short term, to keep their curiosity from interfering with his convalescence. I personally did a search of every berth on the ship, and this is the only one that is vacant, habitable, and large enough to accommodate all the items necessary for his rehabilitation.” He waved his arm in a sweeping motion toward the fitness equipment. “And since we are on that subject, I think it is about time we put him to work.” He turned toward the barbarian’s bed and spoke again. “Are you ready to start getting those legs in shape, Hill?”
The Empty Warrior Page 21