The Empty Warrior

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by J. D. McCartney


  At last the sounds of the spraying torrent ceased behind him. The droplets the shower had left clinging to his upper lip leached a fetid odor into his nostrils like that of an algae filled swamp on a hot summer day. But despite its reek, the mephitic water vastly improved the atmosphere of the compartment as it did wash away much of the overpowering miasma of human excrement. It did not last for long. As soon as the water drained away gravity was suspended once more. Soon afterward the waste products from the human cargo began to once again float about the compartment, the magnitude of the feculence increasing by the hour.

  At first, O’Keefe tried to keep track of the days by counting the arrivals of the feeding machines. His best guess was that they were being nourished at intervals of approximately twelve hours. But after what he thought was about two weeks, he lost count, as well as heart. Life had collapsed into a dark and endless tunnel of monotonous horror with no end in sight. Robots squirting foul sustenance invaded his tormented dreams as the real and the unreal once again began to merge. The only concrete evidence that time moved at all was the stench. It got worse with each passing day. O’Keefe sought refuge in sleep when he could find it, but mostly he simply stared, unseeing, into space.

  Finally, after a span of time that seemed like a millennia, O’Keefe began to feel the effects of braking. At first it was nearly imperceptible, but later he became sure that his head was being pressed forward by g-forces. He began slowly to come back to himself as the thought of leaving the purgatory into which he had been strapped pumped some small measure of vigor back into his being. He could see it in the other men as well. Heads that for days had floated limply above slumped shoulders now began to move, looking up and down, left and right. O’Keefe found himself almost excited at the prospect of debarkation. Whatever the Vazileks had planned for them, it couldn’t be any worse than what they were already enduring.

  Slowly and smoothly the sensation of deceleration peaked and then subsided, and shortly after gravity resumed. O’Keefe struggled to hold his head up. He felt as if lead weights were hanging from his chin. Either the gravity at their destination was stronger than any he had yet experienced, or much of his strength had dissolved under the zero-G conditions of his transport. The clanking mechanical sounds last heard before their departure returned, gradually becoming louder and closer as other cargo carriers were removed from whatever ship that had brought them to whatever port they had reached. At last O’Keefe felt the swaying motion that meant their prison was being lifted. It was swung to one side, lowered, and was roughly deposited on an unyielding surface, the impact producing a cavernous resonation that could only be the result of steel hitting stone.

  Even as the thunderous noise that boomed through the carrier was subsiding, the straps holding the men to their respective pylons released. Many of the Akadeans simply collapsed onto the filthy grating at their feet. Others, like O’Keefe, lurched forward, shocked by the sudden ability to feel his now somewhat impliable limbs. He staggered for a moment, then hugged a pylon in the row before him for support with one rigid arm and roughly jerked the feeding tube from his mouth and throat with the other. The process of pulling it from between his teeth sent spasms of pain into the back of his jaw as it was forced to open too widely. When the tube was out, O’Keefe found it to be nearly a foot long.

  Men around him copied his example. Some vomited as their tubes slid free; all coughed deeply and spat repeatedly. The carrier was filled with the sounds of bodies long abused—grunts and moans, heaves and hacks—but no conversation. No one had the strength. Outside, the sounds of roaring engines and clanking treads approached, as if the container were being surrounded by bulldozers.

  At length some of the men began to whisper among themselves, helping the weakest back to their feet and forming little groups of frightened, degraded humanity. O’Keefe remained where he stood, clutching the pylon, and breathing deeply of the noxious air. He met the eyes of several men around him, nodding but saying nothing. The men all drifted away. O’Keefe’s mind was blank, numb. He was relieved to be unbound and was living only for his next breath. For the moment he cared nothing of the future.

  Suddenly a wide door opened outward and slammed back against the side of the freight carrier with a crash like that of a hundred simultaneous sledgehammer strikes. Light flooded the compartment’s interior, revealing the carrier to be not nearly as large as it had seemed in the dim illumination available during the passage. A voice, male and sonorous, unexpectedly sprang from a dilapidated, floating robot that had entered the carrier and stationed itself at the opening. “Please proceed to the doorway in an orderly fashion,” it said. “Form a line and remain silent. No speaking will be tolerated. Those who do not or cannot obey will be terminated.” The threat was stated as blandly as if the machine were a second grade teacher admonishing a classroom.

  The men began to work their way toward the exit, many holding their comrades upright, steadying them and in some cases nearly carrying them toward the door. A spark of resentment flared in O’Keefe’s gut, reigniting some small portion of the inner fire which had been slowly but inexorably smothered during the long voyage of the damned that he had just endured. He had never much cared for taking orders from anyone—not from his peers on Earth, not from the Akadeans, and not from Seldon—but it really stuck in his craw to hear commands from the Vazilek’s ramshackle robot. He drew himself erect and stepped away from the column he had been clutching, glaring at the machine as if daring it to strike. He stood, rooted in place and unmoving, until all the others were queued up and only then did he move slowly to the back of the line, never taking his eyes from the robot. But the begrimed automaton did nothing in reaction to his tiny insubordination.

  From where O’Keefe stood, he could not see what lay beyond the door, but he could hear more and more of the throbbing sounds of internal combustion accompanied by a multitude of clanks and metallic grinding. Diesel exhaust fumes seeped into the cargo carrier, but O’Keefe hardly noticed. He was nearly oblivious to stench after the time spent tied to the pylon. When the noise outside faded to a dull rumble, the robot vacated its blocking position in the doorway and ordered the man in the front of the line to proceed. The men behind him followed, slowly shuffling toward the exit.

  As the line moved far enough forward for O’Keefe to get a glimpse of what lay beyond the door, a gasp escaped his lips that he could not stifle. There, right outside the freight carrier, rested a perversion of nature ripped from men’s worst nightmares. It looked like a main battle tank, the dirty steel of its hull scarred and unpainted, sitting on wide tracks and spewing thick black fumes. But forward, where the turret should have been, there rose the scaly, elongated neck of a viridian reptile that appeared to be grown directly from the metal chassis beneath. Short spindly arms sprouted from both sides of the creature about half way up its glistening neck, while its head, which looked as if it could tower two stories above the floor when the beast’s neck was fully extended, had simian brow ridges, the large eyes beneath them retaining the reptilian trait of yellow irises and vertical, biconvex pupils. Its jaws looked to be plucked from a Tyrannosaur and were filled with an overabundance of curved, carnivorous teeth. It was further armed with long, sharp talons that it brandished at the ends of its bony fingers.

  One of the men exiting the cargo carrier stumbled directly in front of the beast, falling to one knee, and to O’Keefe’s horror and astonishment the abomination spoke.

  “Get up, human,” it growled menacingly, “before I tear off arm.” It raised the whip it held in its right hand and cracked it loudly over the heads of the men, then prodded the kneeling Akadean with a spear it held in its left. The man poked with it jumped to his feet with a grimace and a shout of pain and lurched out of O’Keefe’s line of sight, still rubbing the area over his kidney where the jab had been applied.

  When O’Keefe approached the exit and turned to his right toward the doorway, he could see that the machine beast was not alone. There were at
least fifty of them in two lines forming a long gauntlet across a level piece of ground. The lines stretched to a large cave-like opening in an opposing cliff face. The prisoners were being marched out between the lines of the creatures; cowering against each other near the center of the passage between their hulls. Any who faltered, as well as any who tried to assist them, were scourged with whips or prodded with lances. One man fell, and despite a half dozen lashes laid across his shoulder blades, he either refused or was unable to regain his feet. O’Keefe watched with revulsion as one of the lizard things reached behind its back to grasp one of the several malevolently shaped steel spears that it carried on the rear deck of its hull. It deftly clipped the hook nosed weapon to a cable and, without hesitation, harpooned the helpless wretch lying prone before it through the middle of his back. It winched the dying man up close to its undercarriage before backing away amid a dark plume of exhaust and a diesel roar, dragging the man and leaving a bloody stain over the ground. The reptiles nearby rumbled out gravelly chortles of approving laughter as their cohort clattered away, the body of the murdered man in tow.

  O’Keefe at last stepped down and out of the cargo carrier, onto the stone on which it rested. To his surprise, he was not outside at all, but rather in an enormous cavern of rough hewn rock with a smooth, but not polished, stone floor. Powerful incandescent lights, hanging from the slightly arched ceiling high above, starkly lit the dull, slate colored vault. Behind him loomed the giant shape of the freighter which had brought them here and above it, built into the ceiling, was a massive, circular steel hatch, now closed, through which the ship had entered. To either side, more cargo containers lay, spread randomly across the floor. Those to his left were empty; those to his right were yet to be opened. The floor was grimy, stained, and pockmarked with large, sunken drains seemingly designed to carry away the refuse and offal that ships brought into this port.

  The man directly in front of O’Keefe fell to his knees at the sight before them. O’Keefe grabbed him roughly by the collar and hoisted him to his feet, but not before the business end of a whip bit into the man’s back. A second strike caught O’Keefe just beneath his left shoulder, tearing open the thin jacket he had salvaged from Sefforia and ripping into his skin. He winced, but kept moving forward without either turning or crying out. Croaked curses erupted from the creatures behind him. He ignored them, and kept walking steadily down the gauntlet toward the arched exit cut into the far wall of the mammoth cavern. As they approached it, he could see that the cut in the rock was an entrance to a tunnel that was split down the middle by a chain link fence that reached from floor to ceiling. The men in the front were being channeled into the right side of the passageway.

  In only a few moments O’Keefe was past the last of the reptiles. Behind him, he could hear the clanking of treads and the roar of diesels as the lizard things rearranged themselves to unload the next container. His eyes quickly adjusted to the relative dimness of the tunnel, and just as quickly another start of trepidation shuddered through him. The column of men was passing between two canines, one sitting against the right wall and one with its thick black coat pressed against the center fence. The dogs were huge, nearly the size of horses, with jaws that could easily crush the chest cavity of any man in the line. As O’Keefe, the last of this batch of prisoners, passed between them, both got to their feet and fell in behind the men, padding slowly down the passageway at the rear of the column.

  O’Keefe looked back, and one of the dogs bared its teeth and snarled menacingly. He glared at the animal, and despite the fear-driven pounding of his pulse said loudly, “Eat shit, dog!” He turned back to face forward and continued down the corridor, not entirely sure the big canine would refrain from sinking its teeth into the back of his neck.

  O’Keefe’s contemptuous comment was the first utterance anyone had made since the men had stepped out of the cargo carrier. As nothing untoward occurred, in short order others began to chatter amongst themselves, most of them fearfully. The men all wanted to know where they were being taken and what was to happen to them. One man tearfully begged for his life, apparently unaware there was no one to plead to. Whoever the whimpering man was, he repeated his whining entreaty over and over until O’Keefe wanted nothing more than to throttle him.

  One voice, sure and strident, abruptly rose above the rest. “You’re not going to die,” its owner assured the men. “If the Vazileks only wanted to kill you they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of bringing you here. Right now all they want is to clean us up and give us new clothing. Just keep walking, and try not to be afraid.”

  To O’Keefe’s astonishment the speaker was the same man whom he had lifted from the floor of the dock. He had hardly seemed like someone who would assume a leadership role, yet now he spoke with a commanding certitude. For the first time O’Keefe gave him a good study and it was plain merely from watching his back as he trudged along that he was quite different from the other prisoners. The others; though filthy, sore, and terrified; still exhibited the essential haleness that O’Keefe had by this time come to accept as a fundamental Akadean trait. But the man before him was bone thin and heavily scarred. Each step he took seemed laborious, while the outline of his bent spine showed clearly through the thin fabric of his shirt. Patches of scalp showed through thinning hair that was streaked with gray.

  O’Keefe slightly quickened his pace until he came abreast of the man. He took his left arm lightly, just above the elbow, and pulled him a little more erect. “Hey, fella,” he said, “Are you all right? You don’t look like you belong with this crowd.”

  The man turned his face to O’Keefe for the first time. His unkempt, salt and pepper beard was not quite thick enough to hide his sallow complexion or the sunken cheeks that framed his hooked and narrow nose. His heavy lidded brown eyes seemed tired but flashed a gleam of quick intelligence. As he smiled wistfully, crow’s feet appeared at the sides of his face. He leaned closer to O’Keefe and spoke in a conspiratorial tone.

  “Well I’ve got a news flash for you mate,” he said. “I’m a damn sight closer to fitting in here than you are. Where’re you from, anyway?”

  If the situation had been less dire O’Keefe would have laughed, but instead he hesitated, then thought, What the hell? Secrets clearly didn’t make any difference at this point. “I’m an Earther,” he said.

  “What? An aberrant?” the man asked, looking at O’Keefe first incredulously, then searchingly. “Yes, by the Rock, you are. You’ve that barbarian look about you for certain, not that that is a bad thing by any means. I certainly mean no offense, as I fancy someone of your size and ancestry would be a good man to stay on the right side of. And I won’t trouble you to tell me how you got here or how you can speak the language, as I’m sure it’s a very long story. The name’s Steenini, Bartle Steenini,” he said, grinning widely and offering his right hand. O’Keefe took it eagerly, and found the man’s seeming frailty belied by the strength of his grip.

  “Hill O’Keefe,” he said. “It’s good to meet you, Bart.” And it was. O’Keefe already liked the man immensely for only having known him a few seconds. Steenini scowled momentarily, perhaps at O’Keefe’s presumptive familiarity in shortening his name, but then seemed to accept the moniker with a shrug as logic dictated that the exigency of their current plight overrode any miscarriages of etiquette.

  “Thanks for the hand out there,” he said. “The beasties didn’t nick you too badly did they?” As he spoke, Steenini leaned backward to get a quick look at the wound on O’Keefe’s shoulder blade.

  “It smarts a little,” O’Keefe replied, “but I think I’ll live. What is this place?”

  Steenini shook his head and sighed. “This, my friend, is Ashawzut, a prison planet, or a mining colony in the official parlance. This is one of the places where the Vazileks send their most recently captured slaves. One either dies here or learns to serve his masters.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t get the impression it was Club Med. How is it you�
��re so well informed?”

  Steenini, for a moment scrunching his features in puzzlement at the Terran reference, replied quickly enough once he decided that it made no difference what a Club Med was. “This is my second time through, and I’m here for good, I’m afraid. I fooled them the first time. I made them think I was ready to do anything they wanted if they would only take better care of me. You see, despite some rather unorthodox views that kept me more or less banished to a more open-minded colony just off the outer rim, my abilities were still rather well regarded in the scientific community before the Vazileks got their hands on me. They of course found out who I was, and when they were convinced that I could be a benefit to them, they took me out of here and put me to work in weapons research.” Steenini lowered his voice to the barest whisper. “I surreptitiously coded a reactor overload into some of their software and blew one their newest ships to space dust during trials. For some reason I was under the illusion that if they could not trace the flaw back to me, I would be safe. I should have known better. They simply tortured everyone who had anything to do with the project, and when they still could not find the responsible party, they loaded us all on to outward bound freighters on their way to pick up Union prisoners. I guess they figure someone will talk after some time spent in the mines, but I’m not telling and nobody else knows. I probably shouldn’t have told you, but I’d bet my balls that you’re trustworthy. I’m a good judge of character, and I wouldn’t take you for a snitch. It’s not every man that would reach out instinctively to help a bloke he’s never met. And besides that, I figure an aberrant won’t react to enslavement any better than I have.”

 

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