The Empty Warrior

by J. D. McCartney

  He ate without comment for several minutes before the inevitable questioning occurred as she broached the subject for a second time. “I want to be sure I comprehend you correctly,” she said. “Am I to understand that in your society it is a sign of civilization,” she used the word sarcastically, “to allow a female to precede a male in any given activity?”

  O’Keefe swallowed a saucy bite of enchilada before he could respond. “It’s not so much a sign of civilization as it is a sign of good manners, and good manners result in civility, and civility leads to a more civilized society. Or at least so I was told.” O’Keefe took another bite, hoping that the captain would do the same and let the conversation die. He was getting the distinct impression that the longer this line of discourse proceeded, the closer he was to being referred to as an uncouth, heathen savage yet again.

  But naturally she would not let it drop. “Why would it be good manners to let a female precede a male?” she asked, seemingly genuinely perplexed by the idea.

  “It’s just a small gesture to show respect for women.” He hoped beyond hope that the amorphous explanation would satisfy her curiosity, but somehow he knew it would not.

  “I do not understand,” she continued. “Are you saying that you find it civilized to show respect for females for no other reason than that they are in fact female?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Fine, I don’t care,” O’Keefe said, annoyed now. “I don’t know why we are even talking about this. I was just trying to be polite, for goodness sake. It’s not some nefarious plot to undermine your authority or lull you into indifference so I might perpetrate some horrible act. I would have done the same thing for any other woman had there been any other women here. It’s just a simple custom for crying out loud.”

  “Say what you will,” the captain retorted. “But our ancestors sprang from the same seed. Our peoples are very much alike, the single exception being your aberrant proclivity to do violence to your neighbors. Respect is something that is earned in any society, it is not simply given. That is a universal constant. To accord someone respect simply because of their gender is illogical in the extreme. You have an agenda of your own, I am sure, but please be aware that any feigned gestures of that sort will have no effect on the performance of my duties where you are concerned.” She made the statement with an air of finality, clearly thinking it impossible that she might be wrong.

  “Whatever,” O’Keefe retorted with resignation, happy enough that the woman had at last let the subject lapse. The rest of the meal passed without discord as O’Keefe strove to avoid any subject that might be even fractionally polemic in the captain’s eyes. He complimented the food, asked questions about the house and Seldon, inquired about her neighbors—there were none, at least not nearby—and made general small talk. He continued in that vein until after dessert was served and eaten and the captain at last excused herself to “go over some reports,” as she put it.

  O’Keefe remained in the dome for hours afterward, finishing the initial portion of emerdal and putting a rather large dent in a second pitcher. It was well after midnight before he drunkenly weaved his way down the stairs and into his bedroom behind one of the house robots that Seldon had assigned to guide him to his quarters. Once there he collapsed fully clothed and face forward onto the bed, falling almost instantaneously into dreams that alcohol would surely not allow him to remember come morning.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN:

  Shadow Nexus

  O’Keefe was restless. For weeks he had been enisled on the captain’s estate and, aside from the mechanical presence of Seldon and the house robots, he had been left utterly alone during the greatest part of his time there. And he was surprised to find that it bothered him so intensely. He had almost always been alone at home, but somehow that had been very different. On his mountain he had been in his own house of his own free will and could leave it whenever he liked, even if he rarely did so. There had been phones and his computer, and there had also been the dogs to keep him company. On Sefforia he was truly isolated.

  The captain came and went at odd hours, sometimes spending nearly all of a day and a night at the shipyard with Vigilant. And during the time she spent at home she seemed to be perpetually poised at the precipice of exhaustion. She generally paused only long enough to bathe and share a meal with O’Keefe before disappearing into her bedroom for sleep.

  Their brief conversations had become more like one-sided diatribes from the captain that centered chiefly around the seemingly interminable verbal battles that she and the supervisors at the shipyard engaged in. It seemed the yard had other, more profitable priorities than expediting the repairs to Vigilant, and had no intention of changing due to any prodding from a single Union Police captain. O’Keefe had no idea why the woman would vent the frustrations of her work to him except that perhaps she was as friendless and forsaken, at least for the time being, as he was. That was as good an explanation as any he could come up with to account for the fact that, despite her sour moods and O’Keefe’s conviction that he really didn’t like the woman, they had not argued since his first day on Sefforia. O’Keefe had even reached the point of nearly looking forward to the short interludes with her if for no other reason than it was the only human contact he was afforded. But it still galled him to no end each time he would discover himself missing her company.

  But however little human interaction O’Keefe was allowed, the machine entity Seldon was his constant, if ofttimes unwelcome, consort. He had learned that the computer was not only capable of projecting its voice and intrusive surveillance into any part of the house, it could also extend its reach network-style into the house robots, or the cars, or even Vigilant. So notwithstanding the fact that he spent so much time alone, he was hardly unsupervised. Seldon constantly watched him, and apparently the captain, or any other person with sufficient authority, could check on him at will. That actuality roiled his mind night and day. With his predisposition to paranoia, never being certain of when he was being watched, and if so by whom, only served to constantly gnaw at the edges of his sanity.

  Boredom was also a near perpetual companion. On his first day alone in the house, Seldon had familiarized him with the entertainment system, which was located in the media room. There he was introduced to Akadean music, which for the most part he found to be spiritless, vapid, and devoid of any content that could in any way be defined as edgy. Most of it sounded like New Age instrumentals for insomniacs.

  Next he delved into a tremendous assortment of interactive games, but they were all strategy based or involved solving long, convoluted mysteries. There were certainly no shooter sims. He was led to understand that there were flight simulators, but he was forbidden to access them. There was not a flying vehicle on the planet that would grant him access to its interior, but the Akadeans apparently had no inclination to take any chances whatsoever concerning the potential escape of an aberrant. Others of the available games did involve a certain amount of vicarious thrills, but no violence of any sort. He played them, and enjoyed some, but more than only a few hours of any of them grew wearisome.

  The spectator entertainments consisted of sports he did not understand, emotional dramas, and news he cared nothing about. Any events of real import were plainly censored from his view anyway, as the system would suddenly shut down from time to time for no discernible reason. There was also an incredible amount of sexually oriented material. The Akadeans had an appetite for sex and pornography that made the Terran internet look virginal by comparison. Anything and everything was readily available for sale, and at prices that Seldon described as being “not overly expensive.” Just the content of the advertising was more lascivious than anything O’Keefe had ever seen. He spent several afternoons viewing impeccably accurate holograms of flawless Akadean bodies splayed across the downstairs carpet engaging in what appeared to be every conceivable sexual act known to humanity. But after the
novelty wore off, the pornography left him frustrated and lonelier than before, and he soon tired of it. For though every holographic promotion represented real people selling real services, he had no money of his own and he could not debit the household account without the express permission of the captain. Furthermore O’Keefe was certain that the strumpets of the planet, like all Akadeans, would be forbidden even to speak to him, much less engage in something more intimate, even had his supply of funds been unlimited. He was, for the most part, even restrained from gaining a manual release from his pent up desires for fear of who might be watching him at the time. So after about three weeks in the house he had given up on the media room almost entirely.

  Instead, in an attempt to keep the anxiety which constantly prowled at the back of his consciousness at bay, he took to whiling away the evenings in drunkenness and spending the long but slowly shortening afternoons in the woods, exploring the terrain of the captain’s estate or just squandering his time lazing beneath the trees. Autumn was in its infancy on this part of Sefforia, so the temperatures were mild and the forest was only beginning to glow with the vibrant hues of fall, providing a beguiling backdrop to his daily excursions. The outdoor jaunts soon became the only thing that gave him any real relief from the engulfing ennui of his incarceration.

  He was free to go outdoors at any time; however Seldon would not consent to unlock the door at the top of the stairwell that led from the garage to the surface until a mechanical escort had been arranged beyond the exit. The usual complement consisted of three of what Seldon called warders. They were identical to the cylindrical machine that never left the room whenever the captain came into his presence. They could hover silently on their internal antigravity generators, or fly weaving through the trees using those same antigravs to push away from or pull toward any physical manifestation around them. Outwardly, they very much resembled the other household robots only they were much smaller and lacked the myriad mechanical arms and connective ports. But inwardly the warders were programmed for only one function: to keep dangerous wildlife away from the human denizens of the property or, in O’Keefe’s case, to keep what the Akadeans considered to be a dangerous human from attempting escape or otherwise making trouble.

  The warders clearly were equipped with sensors that could track him at some distance, as O’Keefe rarely caught a glimpse of them once he left the area immediately around the dome. Yet they would invariably converge on his position as he made his way back to the house. They were also armed, perhaps lethally so. Seldon had gently informed him before his initial afternoon foray that there would be no tolerance for his leaving the estate. Exactly what the machines would do to stop him was left ambiguous, but O’Keefe had little doubt that they were eminently capable of enforcing Seldon’s will. That belief was soon shown to be justified.

  Late on an afternoon when he was following a small rivulet upstream, one of the warders from his retinue glided up to hover only a few feet from his face, startling him by its sudden appearance. It spoke to him in Seldon’s voice. “Please remain where you are,” it intoned. “A rekkot approaches.” Then the flying chromium canister whizzed away to his left.

  O’Keefe’s language implant left him cognizant that a rekkot was a large, ursine predator, brown in color with powerful jaws, flesh-rending teeth, and thick limbs armed with long, retractable claws. The image that coalesced in his mind was terrifying.

  Soon a growing dread was born in his chest as he began to hear ponderous footfalls approaching over the dry leaves that covered the forest floor. The sounds came from the far side a small hillock that was only slightly to the right of where the warder had disappeared. The rekkot had evidently picked up his scent and was following it in a direct line toward his position. Presently its head crested the top of the gently sloping knoll and its eyes searched to the left and right. The creature stopped and seemed to look directly at O’Keefe while it sampled the smells of the forest through wet, fist-sized nostrils. Its enormous nose twitched as the beast searched through every smell in the odor-laden air, seeking the one scent that was evidence of its prey. Nevertheless it did not seem aware of O’Keefe’s presence beyond on an olfactory level, and in seconds it resumed its slow plodding up to the crown of the rise.

  Despite his artificial awareness of exactly what a rekkot was, no amount of stale encyclopedic information could have prepared O’Keefe for the real-life enormity of the animal. When the creature reached the top of the incline it rose to its haunches to sniff the air once more, and it towered to over fifteen feet in height. It raised its head as if the smell it sought were just out of reach, its nostrils visibly contracting with each urgent inhalation, while malevolent claws nearly half a foot in length slowly extended from the base of each massive, shaggy fore-limb. As quickly as they had appeared the mammalian shanks were pulled back to be hidden once more behind the predator’s bristly pelt, but the brief display had been enough for O’Keefe. He was viscerally certain that a single, casual swipe of those talons across his abdomen would be enough to utterly disembowel him, and his flight reflex engaged in the space of a heartbeat.

  He whipped his head around, glancing at the far side of the streambed, gauging his chances of leaping to the other side. They were not good. Here the brook had eaten deeply into the soft floor of the forest, and the scant safety its crossing would have offered lay over a dozen feet away. Worse, the creature, whose eyesight was doubtlessly blunted in comparison to its sense of smell, had finally detected O’Keefe by his movements. There was only some sixty yards between them when his eyes met the beast’s unfocused glare. The rekkot threw back its head and let out a deafening, deep-throated roar that reverberated through the trees and seemed to shake even the ground beneath O’Keefe’s feet. Then the animal dropped to all fours as quickly as its bulk would allow and thundered down the slope directly toward him.

  But as the rekkot took its first strides, a flash of shining movement glinted at the periphery of O’Keefe’s vision. It was one of the warders. The robot adeptly sped to a spot that gave it an aiming point between the trees, slowed, and let loose a perfectly defined streak of bluish-white coruscation from its base. The sizzling bolt of power hung hissing in the air for a fraction of a second, seemingly connecting the bright body of the warder to the right side of the rekkot’s ribcage. As the beam vanished the animal faltered and slowed, roaring again, but this time at a higher timbre, at a pitch unmistakably indicating pain rather than aggression.

  Even as its bellow lingered in the air, a second warder closed from the rekkot’s left, loosing another scorching blast that caught the beast squarely on the side of its neck. O’Keefe could clearly see a wisp of smoke rise from its pelt at the point of impact. The creature skidded to a halt, snarling and snapping its jaws at the empty air beside the charred spot on its hide. Then, growling and showing its teeth, it slowly backed away before turning and retreating back up the hill. Both robots advanced and fired again, as if for good measure, scorching both sides of the rekkot’s posterior as it fled over the crest of the rise, eliciting another guttural roar of pain from the beast’s throat. One of the machines continued its pursuit, flying a mercurial course through the trees behind the retreating rekkot and quickly disappearing from view. The pungent odor of singed hair drifted by O’Keefe’s nose just as he lost sight of the robot.

  “Where the hell’s he going?” O’Keefe wondered aloud.

  An answer came from above and behind him where, unbeknownst to him until that moment, the third warder hovered. “The rekkot was untagged,” it explained, again in Seldon’s voice, as O’Keefe, surprised, whirled to face it. “It was not a mature specimen. The animal is new to the estate, and as it is male it probably wandered into this area attempting to carve out a new territory for itself. That is why it was not detected long before it approached. And as it attempted to attack you, it is either too young to have been inculcated to refrain from such behavior or for some reason, the highest probabilities being disease or extreme hunger,
it has lost its fear of humans. In either case it must be tagged and monitored.”

  “So you keep track of the wildlife around here, too.” O’Keefe said incredulously, his mind still trying to come to grips with the fact that so large a predator had not been a fully grown adult. “I guess in addition to everything else you’re a park ranger. Is there anything you don’t do?”

  “No, I am not a park ranger, as you so pithily put it,” the warder intoned as it lazily descended, stopping just at O’Keefe’s eye level. “The rekkot will be tagged with a monitor that uploads information to the Wildlife Bureau Network. A summary of our encounter with it has already been transmitted. For the foreseeable future the network will record the rekkot’s movements and study its behavior, watching for any further attacks or depredations. Should they occur, the appropriate actions will be taken.”

  “Is taking ‘appropriate actions’ a euphemism for killing it?” O’Keefe asked. He didn’t particularly care one way or the other whether or not the beast had been hurt, but at the moment extermination seemed rather harsh, especially considering that the big predator’s intention to make him dinner had been thwarted with such ease. But beyond that he was interested to see just how humane the judgmental Akadeans and their hardware actually were when faced with a potential threat to life. Their reactions, as played out by their mechanical servants, might give him some insight into what kind of treatment he could expect to receive over the course of a long lifetime in their care, a lifetime which could conceivably offer nothing more than the benevolent confinement he was now enduring.

  “It will not be euthanized unless it is ascertained that the animal is terminally diseased or mentally unbalanced in a way that is beyond our ken,” Seldon answered with all the dispassion that filled her digital heart. “If the rekkot presents further threats to humans, it will first be captured. Then it will be habituated to give humans a wide berth before it is released, at which point it may be relocated as well. Would you be more comfortable if it were to be killed?”