The Empty Warrior (43 page)

“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.

He slowly opened his eyes to find the car hovering over an expanse much like the one from which they had departed the spaceport, only much smaller. The vehicle’s top was already rotating up and away from his head. As soon as it was clear the captain sprang nimbly out onto the surrounding apron.

“Stay here, Mr. O’Keefe,” she said. “Tangie, don’t let him out, and activate the curtain function please. I’ll be back as quickly as I am able.”

She stood by long enough to see the top of the car clamp shut over O’Keefe before striding away between other vehicles toward a door marked “Police Personnel Only.” For several seconds she stood in front of the doorway. O’Keefe guessed there was some sort of identification protocol to be met before she could enter. At last the door swung open to the inside and she was gone.

O’Keefe took a few moments to look around, craning his neck to see as much as possible of what was around him from within the cramped passenger compartment. From what little he could see through the available windows, the area where he now sat was a parking lot that stretched out about a hundred or so feet from the side of the high rise to which it was connected. It seemed to reach around the entire circumference of the rounded structure. Several stories above he could see an identical parking area, and he guessed that there were many more built out from the skyscraper both above and below him.

On the lot where O’Keefe was now imprisoned, there were numerous other vehicles of various sizes, shapes, and colors parked nearby; but they all appeared to be empty and sat atop sets of four sturdy struts rather than floating on antigravs the way the captain had left Tangie.

As he was still gazing about, the door the captain had entered swung open once more, and a couple stepped out onto the deck. They walked almost directly toward O’Keefe, and he waved at them furiously, with both hands, but elicited no response. They simply climbed into a bright yellow machine some ten yards away. It immediately folded its short legs beneath it and soared away into traffic. As he had suspected, the “curtain function” was much like privacy glass; he could see out, but no one could see in.

The minutes stretched into what seemed like an hour, more than long enough for O’Keefe’s jangled nerves to relax and his heartbeat to return to normal. At length he was simply bored. Everything of interest was going on behind him, and as it was uncomfortable to twist his head around to observe the city over his shoulder, he settled deeper into his seat and stared at the unchanging façade of police headquarters. At length his eyelids became heavy and his head slowly tilted back on his spine, a few degrees at a time, until his cranium came to rest on the back of his seat and sleep overwhelmed him.

The hydraulic whine of the car’s top being raised woke him. He blinked away sleep as the captain stepped back into the vehicle and took her seat. “Have a nice nap?” she asked.

“I guess so,” O’Keefe replied groggily. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the thin, black, rubberized ring that now encircled her wrist just below the tight gold sleeve of her uniform.

“It’s my new bracelet,” she snapped waspishly.

“Well, it certainly is an elegant piece,” O’Keefe said, loading his voice with as much sarcasm as he could muster.

“Yes, they’re all the rage here, and very rare. It has taken me all of my life to get one.” The captain spoke the words evenly, and O’Keefe could not tell whether she was serious or not. But before he could pursue the issue any further she addressed the car. “Tangie, take me home. And have Seldon draw a hot bath for my arrival. A bubble bath, with salts and oils, if you please.”

The car rose higher above the lot while acknowledging the captain’s commands, pivoted, and then accelerated out into the stream of traffic that still coursed by the building. Immediately O’Keefe was treated to another petrifying jaunt through city traffic that for a second time slammed his vital signs through the roof. Fortunately, the city seemed to be more tall than wide, and they were out over the forest again in only minutes. But it was still a good while after they had left Bensora behind and had been speeding along on an even keel before O’Keefe could bring his breathing back to normal.

His body did not feel as though he had slept for too long a time, but he must have as it was now past midday and well into the afternoon. Judging by the height of the sun, he estimated there was only another hour or two before sunset. For the first time since they had lifted off the pad at police headquarters he spoke to the captain. “So how far is it to your home, time wise, I mean?”

“Oh, not far,” she answered, “about a half hour.”

Good
, O’Keefe thought,
time enough for a discussion
. “So answer me this,” he began. “Suppose when your ship gets back from Earth it turns out that the Vazileks have indeed attacked there since we left. I don’t think for moment that they would be foolish enough to do that, but just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it has in fact happened, and that the entire population of Earth has been either killed or enslaved. Would your people do anything about it, or would you just let it pass?”

The captain looked at him as if she were trying to discern some hidden trap buried within the question. When she did answer, she spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “I suppose we would do whatever possible to arrest those responsible. Even a barbarous society deserves justice.”

Gaping at her like she had just spoken gibberish, O’Keefe retorted incredulously, “Arrest them? What do you mean
arrest them?
You people don’t even know who they are or where they come from. How would you go about
arresting them
?”

“Mr. O’Keefe,” she answered, now obviously annoyed, “I can see where this conversation is headed, and I am not arguing this point with you. We have been over this ground before. We are making every effort to gain information about the Vazileks. Eventually these efforts will bear fruit, we will open a dialogue with their leadership, and some accommodation will be reached that will put an end to this insane violence. I understand that you are a product of your environment, and that it is difficult for you to accept the way we do things, but accept it you must. If you eventually return to your own world, you will be free to cling to your feral beliefs; but as long as you are living among us, it would behoove you to try to embrace a more civilized view.” She turned her head to gaze out her window as if to put an end to the discussion, but O’Keefe would have nothing of it.

“Not everyone in your society believes that nonsense, you know,” he persisted.

The captain slowly turned her face back to his and regarded him suspiciously. “What would lead you to say such a thing?” she asked pointedly. “You’ve hardly spoken to anyone save a few police officers and some medical staff. How could you possibly know anything about what people think?”

“I’ve spoken to Kira, and she doesn’t believe it. She expects to die in the near future, and she expects to die at the hands of the Vazileks.”

The captain stared back at O’Keefe, disbelief obvious on her countenance, but still she seemed hesitant to refute what he alleged. “I never heard that from her,” she finally said. “Why would she tell you that and not me?”

“Because we were lovers, that’s why.”

“No, you weren’t,” the captain said vehemently. “You were an assignment. I was her lover. She expressed some fears about the Vazileks from time to time, as we all have. But she never said anything about expecting to die. I don’t believe you.”

O’Keefe was far too dumbstruck by the revelation of a sexual relationship between the captain and Pellotte for it to register on his brain that she had spoken far less forcefully than someone who truly placed absolutely no credence in what he had just finished stating. So instead of pressing forward with his arguments all he could do was stumble over his words. “You two?” he said incredulously. “Lovers? While I was with Kira?”

“Yes, while you were with Kira,” she said mockingly.

“What kind of civilization is this?” O’Keefe cried. “Where the police force is full of promiscuous lesbians.”

“You ignorant savage!” the captain spat, infuriated now and leaning closer to him, aggressively intruding into his space. “My husband is missing; he has been for a long time. Kira lost her fiancé in the same way. Neither one of us knows if our men are alive or dead. We were hurt, we were lonely, and we served together. We needed each other. What we had was good for both of us. And we certainly never needed the approval of an aberrant barbarian such as yourself! You may not have noticed this, but most Akadeans have had a great deal more experience in life than you have had, and our sexuality is much more highly developed than yours will ever be. We certainly enjoy sex, but our relationships are precipitated by the emotions that we feel. We are not ruled by simple hormonal attraction, like say an insect, or perhaps you, would be. But I would not expect a beast like you to understand that.”

The captain fell sullenly back into her seat, again assuming her familiar command posture of both arms crossed tightly over her torso, while again staring out her window at the landscape below. This time O’Keefe—properly chastened, utterly shocked, and having failed yet again to gain any traction with the captain as far as enlightening her as to the danger her society faced—kept quiet. He did not know if it was possible for her to have the car summarily eject him from the cabin, but he didn’t feel like tempting fate. The two of them flew onward in silence until Tangie slowed and began to descend toward the trees.