The Empty Warrior

by J. D. McCartney

  As they slowly wound their way around a corner bulkhead, O’Keefe could see a hatch up ahead that opened to the outside. Attached beneath the opening lay the end of one of the gangways he had seen from the observation lounge. The mass of crew members clustering ahead were slowly and patiently merging into a single file line that was moving out of the ship, onto the narrow bridge, and across the high gap that separated Vigilant from the terminal. When O’Keefe reached what appeared to him to be a narrow airlock just inside the outer skin of the vessel, the pace picked up somewhat and instead of shuffling along he was able to take small steps. But as he stepped outside, a second sickly spot of vertigo came over him. The gangway was little more than a three-foot-wide metal swath extending for what looked to be close to a hundred yards from the terminal out to the ship’s hull. Vigilant’s wingspan would not allow her to dock any closer. Instinctively O’Keefe spread his arms to steady himself and as he did so his left hand, and then the bag held in his right, impacted something solid. Exploring the contacts by feel he realized that the gangway was in fact enclosed; but that the enclosure was constructed of the same transparent material as the floor of the observation lounge. It had a slick, almost unctuous feel under his fingertips yet it would not accept the smudges of his prints.

  And despite the tactile evidence that he was undeniably secure within an invisible tunnel, he crossed the span with great care. He kept his eyes riveted on the spine of the crewman before him and avoided even the slightest glance downward or to the side, while at the same time keeping his hands in constant contact with the unseen walls surrounding him.

  After crossing what felt like a much longer distance than he had seen at the start, O’Keefe finally stepped into the terminal building itself, breathing a huge sigh of relief as his feet hit the white marble floor. As he stood luxuriating amidst the sudden lack of height-induced nausea, the captain breezed past him and set off into the building like a woman on a mission. She strode off toward the rear of the terminal casting only an occasional glance back over her shoulder at O’Keefe, who followed as quickly as a man gaping stupidly about was able.

  The giant terminal was not at all as it had outwardly appeared. As they had approached in Vigilant, the building had looked to be a solid, rectangular slab on legs; dark and vaguely forbidding. But once inside the edifice showed itself to be as light and elegant as any architecture O’Keefe had ever seen. Large, smooth, elliptical openings, set at uniform intervals, lined the length and breadth of the ceiling. Leafy vines fell downward through them from the forest above. Beneath each opening was a corresponding hole in the floor, each surrounded by a thigh high—for O’Keefe anyway—wall of white, polished stone. He swerved away from the captain’s course for long enough to pass his hand over the top of one of the little walled enclosures, just to confirm his suspicions. As he had expected, his fingers found more of the Akadeans’ indiscernible glass. The openings were not skylights, they were hollow columns. And through them all, filtered by the forest over their heads, streamed natural light. Birds dove down or flapped their way upward through the tubes, unmindful of the humans who walked by only a few feet away.

  Even the outer walls of the building, black and seemingly impenetrable from the outside, were invisible from within. Once inside the ceiling seemed to float high above while an unhindered view of the landscape stretched away in every direction. The result was a magnificent combination of symmetrical modernity tempered with a touch of the beauty and disorder of nature. It was quite impressive.

  O’Keefe turned to look back at the ship he had just departed. She lay outside the unseen wall; her dimensions stretching farther than the length of the long side of the terminal, where she rested on two great struts that had extended from beneath the station. My God, he thought. Her sleek ebony shape was scorched, scarred, and patched down nearly the whole of her hull. Her vertical stabilizer was in the same condition, only worse. It had at least a half-dozen wounds that perforated the tail completely. He suspected the wings were similarly shot through, but they stretched across nearly the same plane as his vision, so he could see little more than the leading edge of the one closest to him.

  He returned his attention to the captain. She was stalking off into an empty area at the back of the terminal, away from the front corner where the rest of the crew was gathering. He jogged for a bit to catch up with her, and once he did so his longer stride allowed him to settle into a relaxed and easy gait that kept him at her shoulder. “Hey lady,” he said, “don’t you ever slow down? Smell the roses, that kind of thing.”

  “What?” she replied, annoyed and quizzical at the same time.

  “The view, the building, the birds, the fresh air. You’ve been cooped up inside that ship for months, I would think you would want to take it easy for a minute, enjoy this just a little.” She turned her face up to look at him like he was maniacal, then returned her gaze forward and continued to cut a path through the terminal.

  “I’ve been here many times before,” she said. “I’ve seen everything there is to see.”

  Okay, O’Keefe thought, be that way. He made no further attempts at small talk.

  As they approached the rear wall, he could see that beyond it was a gleaming, white deck several hundred feet wide that ran the length of the building. It was enclosed by sturdy railings that appeared to be constructed of stainless steel. It was also completely deserted, but the captain marched through a door out onto the apron and then, with no further ado, stopped. O’Keefe stood patiently at her side until he could stand it no longer. “So what happens now?” he asked.

  “We wait,” she said, offering no further explanation. She simply stood there in the blustery wind that gusted with enough force to free her hair from the loose knot she had formed behind her head. Now her hair blew over her face in a way that kept O’Keefe from seeing her expression.

  “Wait for what?” O’Keefe asked, vexed and enunciating each word very slowly and very precisely.

  “My car,” she answered, mimicking his rhythm and inflection as she did so. She turned toward him and brushed the hair back from her face. “As you may have noticed my ship has taken quite a beating, so the robot corps isn’t quite up to speed. And despite the fact that the crew is carrying out everything that they can, it may still take a while for the bots to off-load everyone’s belongings. Our transportation will arrive as soon as our things are loaded aboard it. Please be patient.”

  “Hey, I’m patient,” O’Keefe said defensively. “I just wanted to know what was going on, that’s all.”

  “Well, now you know,” the captain concluded. She turned away again while O’Keefe stood by, brooding.

  Momentarily a glint of reflected sunlight at the edge of O’Keefe’s vision caught his attention. He looked to his left to see a streak of metallic red diving at the platform where they stood.

  “Holy shit,” he cried without thinking. He grabbed the captain by an arm and pulled her away, reflexively turning to shield her with his body while pushing her toward the wall of the terminal when without warning, his strength abruptly failed and he collapsed as if he were a blob of flesh bereft of any skeletal structure. But his mind still worked and was aware that the impact, explosion, and debris that he had braced for never materialized. Potency slowly returned to his muscles until at last he was able to roll himself over and sit up.

  The captain stood facing him with her feet spread wide and her arm outstretched, eyeing him warily. The weapon in her fist was pointed directly at his chest. Behind her, floating a few inches off the ground, was a polished red machine that looked like a sleeker version of an automobile from the 1950s but with an elongated trunk and no hood or wheels.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the captain demanded.

  “That thing,” O’Keefe stammered, pointing at the shining contrivance behind her. “It was coming right for us.”

  “It’s my car. It’s supposed to come for us,” she said dryly, still pointing the paralyzer directly at his s
ternum.

  “But it looked like it was going to fly right into the ground,” he said, using his left hand like an airplane to demonstrate the angle at which it had been approaching.

  The captain relaxed and exhaled, lowering her weapon. “All right, fine,” she said. “Just get in. And don’t touch me again,” she added, pointing an extended forefinger at him for emphasis. She turned and walked toward the machine, and as she did so the roof and windshield assembly, which was hinged at the base of the windscreen, elevated ninety degrees until the roof was pointing directly at the sky, revealing two seats. She stepped lightly into the right seat while O’Keefe pushed his now smarting and sore body up off the deck, which had a consistency akin to concrete, and plodded painfully over to and around the car before maladroitly squeezing himself into the too small passenger compartment. Above his head the front of the car body swung back down, closing with a slight thunk and an almost inaudible hiss.

  “Good morning, Valessanna,” a feminine voice intoned. It was the car speaking, though the voice did not seem to come from any particular spot in the cabin. It also sounded perfectly human; there was not the slightest trace of mechanical or electrical reproduction. “Did you have a nice trip?” the voice inquired.

  “Hardly,” the captain snorted in reply.

  “I’m sorry. Shall I take you directly home then?”

  “No,” the captain said tiredly, “I have a stop to make in Bensora. I have to pick up my…” Her voice trailed off, and she gave O’Keefe a strange sideways glance. “I have to pick up some jewelry. Take me to police headquarters, please.”

  “Certainly,” the car replied, moving forward even as it spoke. It lifted off the terminal apron and accelerated rapidly away while stubby wings spread from its undercarriage. Banking sharply to the left as it gained altitude, the car performed a one hundred eighty degree turn before rolling its wings back parallel to the horizon and climbing away from the spaceport at roughly a twenty degree angle.

  Its interior seats were contoured and deep, and the one O’Keefe currently occupied had seemed to mold itself to his back and thighs and now held him quite securely in place; nevertheless he was far from comfortable with the maneuvers the machine was performing. He searched in vain for some type of restraint but found nothing.

  “Are there any seatbelts in this sled?” he finally asked, raising his voice ever so slightly to be certain he was heard over the whisper of the air sliding off the windscreen as the car hurtled onward.

  “No,” the captain replied. “But don’t worry. You won’t need any.” She spoke again, this time apparently to the car. “Tangie, how long to Bensora?”

  “Eight minutes and forty seven seconds at our current velocity,” the disembodied voice replied. “Shall I change our speed?”

  “No, that’s fine. I was just wondering. But keep us beneath the clouds, okay. I like being able to see the ground for a change.”

  “I understand,” was the car’s reply. Immediately, its nose pushed down until the car was in level flight.

  O’Keefe laughed. “Your car is named Tangie?” he asked, and then laughed again.

  “Look,” the captain said, in a mildly irritated tone, “she was built by the Tangent Corporation, so she is Tangie. I had to call her something. What would you have named her?”

  “I don’t know,” O’Keefe said, bemused. “It’s just hard for me to get used to a talking car, that’s all. What happens if I talk to Tangie?”

  “Unless I authorize her to accept input from you—which, by the way, I am not going to do so don’t even think about it—nothing will happen. This is my car, she goes only where I or Seldon tell her to go, and you won’t be needing a ride anywhere anyway.” She looked at him sternly for a moment before turning her head away to watch the forest flash by below.

  But her words were the last straw for O’Keefe. Like a kitchen match pulled too far across a rasp, what until that point had been mere aggravation with the Akadeans suddenly flamed into anger. He had had enough of their haughty, superior attitude, and he had grown especially weary of one Captain Valessanna Nelkris. In the beginning he had grudgingly accepted his position among them because he was a bit amazed by their technological prowess. And they had made him whole again. Later, his relationship with Kira had acted to soothe any resentment he felt about his pariah status. But she was gone now, and after making love to her time and time again, he was certain that, other than the accident of where he had been born, the Akadeans were no different, and certainly no better, than he or any other Terran-reared human. He would not spend the next several hundred years being the butt of their paranoia and prejudice. Somehow, he was going to get home, but only after stealing the secret to their longevity. Then he would live an extraordinarily long life, exalted as a hero among men.

  He placed very little credence in the Akadean fear that the Vazileks had perhaps decimated Earth. Why would they attack a single planet that was armed to the teeth and bristling with warriors of every description when they had the whole of Akadean civilization spread out before them, defended only by a meek and indecisive gaggle of so-called “policemen”? O’Keefe was rather certain that the night the Vazileks attacked Vigilant’s barge was the last Earth would see either head or tail of them for a very long time. He might have to live a thousand years before he could witness them coming back to the Sol system.

  O’Keefe was still plotting his revenge fantasy when a nonconformity in the relentless ocean of foliage drew his eyes forward. Far ahead he discerned a gray spike, rising from the green horizon, that seemed to split the sky. As he watched, the spike widened, gained definition, and brightened to a vast collection of what appeared to be glass and polished steel. He felt himself being pushed slightly forward as Tangie shed speed. They were approaching Bensora. As they closed on the metropolis O’Keefe’s eyes were slowly able to distinguish individual buildings. They looked normal enough from a distance, but as the miles sped by they grew, filling the windscreen until they blocked everything else from sight. The shiny giants rose thousands of feet into the air, colossal testaments to the talents of their builders. There were buildings constructed into every shape imaginable: columnar towers, boxy monoliths, obelisks, pentagons, hexagons, and arches. The only common denominator they possessed was that they were all grandiosely tall, tall enough that the random clouds scattered about the sky floated through the city rather than above it, obscuring the crowns of the structures as they passed.

  “My God,” O’Keefe breathed, briefly forgetting his enmity toward everything Akadean. He leaned forward and gazed up through the top half of the windshield. “They’re enormous.”

  “Excuse me?” the captain asked.

  O’Keefe had been so overcome by the sight of the structures he had unconsciously reverted to English for the umpteenth time. “I was saying the buildings, they’re quite large,” he repeated mordantly, once again remembering to be angry.

  “That’s only the half of it,” the captain said with near reverence, as if in awe of the sight herself after so long a time away. “What you are seeing is only housing and the service industries that cater to the population. The working section of the city is all underground.”

  “I got the impression from Kira that all your factories were orbital,” O’Keefe said suspiciously. “What happened to that?”

  “Oh, that’s only for the ones that need zero-g for their processes or produce toxic byproducts. The rest are welcome under our cities.”

  The view before them expanded until O’Keefe could no longer lean far enough forward to see the upper reaches of the buildings. He leaned back and turned his attention to the spaces around each structure, where he could make out thousands of tiny specks that looked like gnats swarming through Bensora. It took him a moment to realize that what he was seeing were other vehicles, uncounted numbers of them—and all of them in motion. The moving motes gave the buildings in the background scale and O’Keefe realized that as immense as he had conceived them to be, he had
still grossly underestimated their size.

  Tangie slowed even more and suddenly banked sharply to the right just as they were on the verge of entering the city. A moment later the car banked hard to the left and climbed steeply between two spectacular skyscrapers before leveling off. The air was thick with other vehicles. Tangie descended, rose, banked to one side and then the other while the thousands of machines around her did the same. The movements were smooth enough, but not a moment passed when a collision did not seem imminent. O’Keefe gripped the edges of his seat with white-knuckled ferocity. “Good God!” he murmured, again in English, and through gritted teeth.

  “This is why I live in the country,” the captain said, apparently unconcerned. “Dealing with this traffic would make me crazy.”

  “Do they ever hit each other?” O’Keefe asked, his voice fraught with apprehension.

  “It happens. Not very often, but every once in a while there’s a malfunction. It’s not pretty, particularly if it happens up high. There’s falling debris and oftentimes some secondary collisions.”

  “Well, that’s certainly reassuring,” O’Keefe deadpanned.

  “Don’t worry. If a collision were imminent, the passenger compartment would be ejected. And even should it be impacted, it is well equipped with passive restraints and protective gear. Fatalities in traffic accidents are rare to the point of near nonexistence.”

  Abruptly the car dropped into a dive steep enough to leave O’Keefe’s stomach on a higher plane, while in the process avoiding an impact by a minuscule margin. Simply holding on no longer sufficed, O’Keefe looked away from the captain and clamped his eyelids shut, a silent prayer for deliverance in his head, a racing pulse ringing in his ears, and his jawbones clinching his molars together like a vise. Presently he felt the angle of their descent shallow and the gyrations of the vehicle abate; then suddenly there was no movement at all.