The Empty Warrior (55 page)

Finally, the machine sounds that had repeatedly echoed through the compartment ceased. Shortly afterward O’Keefe felt the sensation of upward and forward momentum, of flight. Then abruptly his head was pressed back forcefully against the pylon that held him. That continued for some time, the ship having entered a long period of steady acceleration. At last the feeling was followed by the jolt of a deep drive engaging and shortly thereafter by weightlessness. Before him, each prisoner’s arms, no longer held at their sides by gravity, rose eerily until making contact with the men to their left and right. O’Keefe looked down at his own arms and found that they too had risen, insensately touching the men at his sides. In front of him, every man he could see stood as if crucified, the eerie red light of the compartment reflecting garishly off their wet skin.

Whether a day or merely a few hours passed O’Keefe could not reliably say. But after what seemed an eternity he discerned movement forward of where he stood. Robots were moving slowly along between the rows of humanity, stopping for a moment in front of each prisoner. One worked its way down the row directly in front of O’Keefe, and through the tangled mass of bodies he could see that the squat, dingy machine pulled a floating rectangular bin behind it. Attached to the bin was a coiled length of hose with a trigger activated nozzle at one end. The robot held that trigger in one of its many mechanical hands. As it stopped in front of each captive, it used two of its appendages to grasp the prisoner firmly by the cranium and the chin, then used a third arm to insert the nozzle into the tube extending from each man’s mouth. It squeezed the trigger for a few seconds before detaching the nozzle and moving on to the next man. Apparently it was feeding time in perdition.

Shortly a robot arrived in front of O’Keefe. It took his head in a vise-like grip and began to inject whatever it towed behind it down into his stomach. He tasted nothing, but the fluid pumped into him felt viscid through the plastic cone and tubing that filled his mouth and throat. He had the intangible impression that his nourishment was of the consistency of cold and slowly drying oatmeal, but he couldn’t really be sure. That ghostly perception had come to him as only the merest hint of a gossamer sensation, and one that rested at the outer limits of what little feeling his artificially impaired nervous system could still produce. In any case, the automated feeding machine soon decided O’Keefe had been sufficiently filled and pulled the nozzle away, moving on to the next man.

When all the prisoners had been impregnated with their share of coagulating swill, the robots exited the chamber. Weak gravity suddenly emanated from the floor, pulling the men’s arms down to their sides. Immediately howling jets of water activated behind O’Keefe. The noise they created became steadily louder until at last the sound passed both over and under him and he was soaked by stinging pulses of water that left his locks matted to his scalp and again hanging into his eyes. He looked up, and through the blur of wet hair could see a suspended pipe moving away from him, spewing water in sheets from horizontal slits cut into its underside, washing down each row of prisoners as it traversed the compartment from back to front. A twin followed its path and shot water up at the men from under the grating on which they stood. The shower pipes disappeared into the gloom, but shortly the roar of their passage began to increase as they returned for a second soaking. The water they propelled at O’Keefe came with such force that he was certain it had reddened his cheeks and forehead, but as he had faced the assault with his head leant back as far as he was able, it did have the one positive effect of blasting his hair back away from his face.

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.