The Empty Warrior (40 page)

Pellotte stood downcast, staring vacantly at a bulkhead. “I’ve come to say goodbye,” she stated simply. “I am to be quarantined, along with everyone else aboard who has had any contact with you. Those who decide such things will not allow me to see you again.”

O’Keefe dropped his feet to the floor and sat up straight. It took several moments for the import of her words to sink in. “Well, that’s just great,” he said at last, while crumpling the bag the captain had provided into a ball and throwing it side-armed, as hard as he was able, against the facing wall. “You’re leaving, and I’m to be stuck alone with that cold fish captain of yours. Wonderful.”

“Cold fish?” Pellotte asked quizzically.

“It’s just a saying we barbarians use.”

“It doesn’t sound very complimentary.”

“It’s not.” O’Keefe rose from his seat and crossed the deck to stand before Pellotte. He fidgeted awkwardly, searching for words. At length he simply embraced her. “I wish you weren’t going away,” he whispered.

“So do I,” she said. “But I am, and there is nothing either of us can do about it.” She paused for a long moment, returning his embrace before speaking again. “We will never see each other again. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Well, hell,” he joked, using the English word to curse, as Akadean contained no words referencing the underworld, “don’t be so optimistic. You never know. The way I hear it, you might live another eight, nine hundred years. We might run into each other again. They can’t keep both of us shuttered away forever.”

“No,” she said, pushing away from him slightly. “I don’t think that’s going to happen. I don’t feel like I’m to have a long life. I’ve been considering the things you’ve said about the Vazileks, and I can’t help but think that you are right about them. Our leaders look at them as if they are like us, as if they—deep down—think as we do. They’ve pinned all their hopes on that, and I no longer believe it. I don’t think I’ve really believed it for a very long time, because I’ve seen what they are capable of. They will never tire of their attacks. Things will only get worse, just as they have been getting worse for years, and we are not ready for that. I have had the most intense feelings lately that the days left to me, and the days left to most everyone else on the force, are numbered.”

“Well I didn’t mean to make you so fatalistic,” O’Keefe said. “I was just trying to make everyone see what might occur. It doesn’t mean it’s an absolute. Anything can happen. I merely assert that you should try to prepare for the worst. And I certainly wouldn’t give up the fight before it even starts.”

He was lying of course. He was still quite sure the Vazileks meant to conquer the Akadeans and that there was a good chance they were fully capable of doing so. But he felt it was his duty as a male to try and say something to comfort the woman.

“Yes, I know,” she said. “But I still have a bad feeling about the future, and it won’t go away. I can’t help it.” She was silent for a moment before continuing. “I must go. Try to be nice to Valessanna.” She stood on tiptoe as he bent down to receive a small kiss on the cheek, then she fled his arms, nearly running out of the door, and leaving O’Keefe standing alone.

He remained standing, immobile, for some time, sorting through his feelings. His situation had again changed so dramatically and so abruptly that he wasn’t at all sure how he really felt about it. Was he heartbroken? No, it wasn’t that. There was no insatiate ache slowly filling his chest, no feeling of his appendages too leaden and tired to move, no sensation of his soul draining out the undersides of his heels. He cared deeply for Kira, but he had found that having her was an altogether different thing from lusting after her. He simply did not feel that all-consuming desire for her that could rob a man of sanity, that madness named love that could reduce the most stouthearted fighter to feeble quivering faster than Delilah’s razor.

No, what he felt was more the sadness of loss, not just of a woman, but also of a time. It was the empty melancholy that falls over a man when he has reached the end of a fair season and knows it, and further knows that it can never be recaptured. Pellotte had almost certainly been correct. They would never see one another again. There would no more long sessions of lazy sex, no more languid, laughing, after dinner conversations. It was quite possible that even her premonitions of death would be prophetic. The Vazileks could very well end up killing both of them, and in the not so distant future.

“Aw, the hell with every damn thing,” he said out loud, and in his native tongue. “You just gotta put one foot in front of the other and deal with it.” He crossed the floor to where the crumpled black bag lay, knelt to pick it up, and then made his way into the bedroom where he proceeded to stuff into it all the clothing that the Akadeans had given him. He didn’t like anything that was available for him to wear, and did not believe he could possibly be provided with anything worse on Sefforia, but there was really no telling. That damn captain might have him wearing a pink tutu if he brought nothing with him. So he took everything, even the formal wear. Packing took only a minute, after which he donned pants, shoes, and a shirt before walking out of his quarters and into the corridor.

Captain Nelkris stood a few yards down the hallway, leaning against a bulkhead. She had struck a familiar pose, standing as usual with her arms tightly crossed and an unpleasantly severe expression imprinted over her face. As he entered the corridor, the woman pushed herself away from the wall and approached him warily, studying him as she always did. “I should have thought your goodbyes with Kira would have taken considerably longer,” she said as she advanced.

“What would you know about it,” he said gruffly. The woman had not been in his presence more than a few seconds and she was already irritating him. But if she was aware of the fact, it wasn’t evident in her demeanor. She stood before him, gazing placidly past him at the wall.

“My home is beautiful, is it not?” she asked absently.

“Excuse me?” replied O’Keefe, not having the foggiest idea what she was talking about.

“Sefforia,” she said, gesturing with a sweep of her hand to the bulkhead behind him. He turned to find one of the floor to ceiling panels that made up the sides of the corridor now showing a three-dimensional image of the planet they were orbiting, this despite the fact that during the weeks they had spent deep driving through the void that one panel had appeared to be no different from any other.

“I was born there,” the captain continued. “My home is there.” She stepped past O’Keefe and stood next to the illuminated bulkhead. “I live here, in Valenta,” she said, pointing to a green expanse, a continent roughly the same shape and relative size as Australia but set in what appeared to be, from where they gazed down upon the planet, Sefforia’s northern hemisphere. The continent looked as if it sat roughly halfway between the equator and the pole, and rotated slowly away from them as she spoke.

“Oh,” O’Keefe muttered, at last understanding. “Yes, it is beautiful.” He made the statement flatly and without conviction, but the world truly was lovely. Sefforia hung before them like a deep blue pearl. From their vantage point it looked like at least 80 percent of its unfrozen surface was covered by water, while both poles were blanketed by large expanses of ice. In addition to Valenta, he could see two other smaller, island continents on the sunlit side of the world. All three, from what he could discern through the cloud cover, appeared to be completely forested or at least green with vegetation from end to end and top to bottom.

“But it’s not Earth,” he concluded.

“Do you miss your world?” the captain asked.

“Of course.”

“But why? You were disabled. You were paralyzed, unable even to walk. Your life there would have been extremely short and filled with hardship. How can you pine for such an existence?”

O’Keefe thought of Pellotte’s apprehensions and his own ideas about what the Vazileks were plotting. He wanted to tell the smug little captain that he might not live very long here either, but thought better of it. “I don’t miss being a cripple,” he said at last, “but it is my home, and it appears that I will always be a stranger here. If it were up to me I’d go back in a heartbeat, back to my dogs and my lake and my house on the mountain.”

The captain turned her face up to his. “I’m sorry, but that may not be possible,” she said earnestly. “Believe me; we would rather that you return to your home as well. Your presence here makes for many difficulties. But there may be even greater difficulties with any attempt to repatriate you. This will be hard for you to accept, I’m sure, but now that the Vazileks are aware of your world, you may no longer have a home. They’ve never before, at least as far as we know, taken a world as populous as your own, but they do have a history of seizing easy targets wherever they find them, and your people are out there all alone. We have sent a ship, but it will be some time before we know whether or not sending you back is an option.” For the first time, O’Keefe thought he saw a bit of empathy peeking from behind the captain’s hard eyes.

“Why couldn’t I simply have gone with the ship that is going there?” he asked. “I’d like to see what’s happened for myself.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. O’Keefe, but that was not possible. I sent a message to police headquarters that told of you presence aboard
Vigilant
while you were still in a coma. That was months ago. The frigate sent to reconnoiter has long since departed. You will remain here until its return, until we know the status of you world. Now come with me if you please.
Vigilant
is nearly ready for atmospheric flight, and I wish to watch the descent.”

She turned and walked away as if there was no question that O’Keefe would follow, and since he hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to get off the ship on his own or what he would do afterward even if he somehow managed to do so, he sheepishly trailed in her wake. But it vexed him severely. The captain’s dictatorial demeanor, despite the short amount of time he had heretofore been forced to spend in her presence, never ceased to annoy him. She was quite simply an unpleasant woman to be around. But it looked like, at least for the time being, he would be forced to put up with her arrogance, so he kept his mouth shut and shuffled along behind her, frowning.

She halted at the first lift. The elevator system’s artificial intelligence was aware of her presence outside one of its doors and, duly taking note of her rank, routed the first available empty car to her. So despite the fact that O’Keefe was still forbidden to mingle with the crew, for this ride there was in essence no wait at all. Once she and O’Keefe were aboard, again, because of her rank, the system automatically rerouted traffic out of their way to take the captain to her stated destination, the forward observation lounge, in the shortest possible time. In a matter of seconds, the car stopped, the door opened, they were out of the lift and approaching an entry hatch.

As the door slid aside and the captain strode through, O’Keefe was frozen where he stood by the sight before him. “Whoa,” he said softly, before finding the wherewithal to back away from the opening. There appeared to be nothing but empty space beyond it. The room had a ceiling, but no floor or walls save the one the hatchway was mounted in. The captain appeared to be suspended in the vacuum before him.

She looked back at him as if amused, a small and only momentary smile flitting across her lips. “Look, there is a floor,” she said, stomping her heel twice to demonstrate. “It’s just transparent. Trust me.”

O’Keefe gingerly set one vertiginous foot inside the compartment and then the other. He walked, still not entirely trusting the unseen floor and sliding his feet forward rather than striding normally, until he reached the captain’s side. There he took a moment to scrutinize the compartment. The lounge was roughly triangular in shape. The overhead and the wall that was the base of the triangle were the familiar off-white composite that made up the corridors and walls throughout the ship. But the floor and the two walls which enclosed the lounge were not just transparent, they were invisible. Whatever was beneath his feet reflected none of the light emanating from the ceiling, nor did it show any dirt or give any other visible clue to his eyes of its existence. There was also no furniture sitting about to give concrete evidence of a floor’s existence, and O’Keefe was still not entirely convinced that what he stood on covered the whole of the area beneath the ceiling. He stood rock still were he was, afraid to move, and looked down tentatively to see the planet Sefforia growing larger by the minute.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“We are under the apex of
Vigilant’s
bow,” the captain answered. “Look behind you. Off to either side you can see the tips of the wings.”

O’Keefe glanced over his right shoulder and was reassured by the sight of one of the wingtips hanging aft. It added some small bit of substance, at least psychologically, to the transparency beneath his feet.

“This is…interesting,” he said. “I asked Kira to show me around as much as possible, but I never saw anything like this.”

“You wouldn’t have,” the captain replied absently, looking up from her observance of the planet that still steadily rose toward them. “There are several other lounges scattered along the hull for crew use, but this one is off limits to all but senior officers. As you can see it is rather small.”

Her voice suddenly assumed a more imperious tone. “
Vigilant,
two chairs please.” Immediately, two previously imperceptible panels in the ceiling slid aside and two pewter hued, upholstered chairs, suspended on jointed arms, descended to a level only a few feet above the unseen floor.