The Empty Warrior (59 page)

Forty-two dove to floor, his sides heaving for breath. “Now stand, quickly!” He jumped to his feet this time, still refusing to meet Elorak’s eyes, while his chest rose and fell rapidly. “Better,” she spat through clenched teeth. “Now remove your clothing.”

The man pulled his tee shirt over his head and dropped it to the floor in front of him. He half knelt to untie his boots before hopping about awkwardly on one leg and then the other as he pulled them from his feet. With shaking hands he pulled the drawstrings of his trousers from inside the waistband and began to fumble furiously with them. The ends had snarled as he attempted to release the tied cords and now, despite Forty-two’s best efforts, the twisted knot would not come free.

It was too much for his new goddess. “Damn you, Forty-two,” she said, the anger in her voice rising with each word. “I have had enough of your insolence!” She reached down and pulled a pistol-like weapon off the outside of her right boot, raised it and fired an argent blast at Forty-two’s torso. The man exploded in a burst of crimson. Body parts and bits of flesh littered the stage; the three men kneeling near to where Forty-two had stood were covered in blood. “You three,” she ordered, her voice sibilating malignantly, “get me number forty-one.”

In moments Forty-one and the three lackeys knelt on the stage before Elorak, their faces pressed into the gore left by Forty-two’s murder. Fortyone jumped to his feet at Elorak’s command, ripped the clothing from his body when he was ordered to and tossed them heedlessly about the bloody stage. When he stood naked before her, Elorak smiled cruelly.

“Much better, Forty-one,” she said softly and soothingly, nodding all the while. Then she reached down and pulled something from her right boot, next to where she had replaced her pistol. As it caught the light and glinted O’Keefe could see that it was a large knife with a sharply serrated and lustrous blade. She tossed it toward Forty-one, where it landed hilt first at his feet. “Pick it up,” she commanded. He quickly did so. “Good,” she said. “Now emasculate yourself.”

Forty-one’s jaw fell slightly as he looked at Elorak in disbelief. That was all it took. “You impudent pig!” she screamed, with more hatred seething in her voice than O’Keefe had ever heard from anyone at any time. “How dare you question my commands!” Forty-one saw her reach once more for her side arm and dropped the blade, turning to run. He made one stride toward the watching crowd, but as his weight came down on the second step, Elorak cut his leg from beneath him with a single blast. His ribcage struck the forward edge of the stage as he toppled down to the floor of the chamber, landing with an audible thud. He lay there screaming and clutching at the bloody stump that a moment before had been a working appendage. Elorak walked calmly forward, looked down, took aim, and exploded Forty-one’s head. A stillness born of rapt disbelief filled the cavern.

She looked out over the men and scowled. “I can kill you worthless, sniveling piles of excrement all day long if that’s what you want. We have plenty of time. However, if death is not your desire, one of you had better learn to do as I say.” The pitch and decibel level of her voice again increased with each word until she was red faced and screaming virulently. “Bring me number forty!”

Forty was apparently resigned to his fate and meant to sacrifice himself for the good of the others. He marched to the foot of the stairs without having to be prompted, the three lackeys merely following lamely behind him as he ascended. He knelt in the blood and dutifully removed his clothing with alacrity when the order came. When the bloody knife fell at his feet, he picked it up and grabbed his genitalia in one hand while with the other he severed them from his body with one sickening, upward slash. Unable to suppress a scream of agony, Forty sunk to the floor with his hands pressed tightly between his legs as he tried desperately to stanch the flow of his blood.

Elorak stood over him in triumph, savoring her moment of ultimate power. Then she bent down for the knife, wiped its blade and her gloves on Forty’s discarded tee-shirt, and rose, gesturing to her three lackeys. “Take him to the infirmary,” she said, her tone revealing only contempt. “Find his privates and take them, too. Have him sewn back together.” She turned and approached the front of the stage, speaking soothingly as several other men from her retinue of bootlickers climbed the stairs to help carry Forty away. “There, do you see. The man who obeyed my orders experienced only some small amount of pain. He will almost certainly be unable to procreate, but your future holds no possibilities in that area regardless of the circumstances. And in a short time Number Forty will be more or less none the worse for wear, no different than you who still stand before me. Whereas the two who did not obey have succeeded only in making an abominable mess for my favorites to cleanse from this chamber. So you see I am not so cruel as long as you do as I command. Remember this well. Obedience is life, defiance is death. That is all you need to know here. Now, there will be one more repetition to insure that you understand. Show me how you will behave at my approach.”

Her audience fell to their knees as one and touched their foreheads to the ground. “Much better,” Elorak cooed. “Now for your next lesson. You will never speak to me or address me in any manner unless I command it of you. You will be silent in my presence. But should you ever have the good fortune to be questioned by me, you will address me as ‘Your worship.’ If you should fail to adhere to this rule the penalty is the same as that merited by most any other infraction. That would be death, and depending on my mood, probably not so swift a death as you have witnessed here today. Punishment in the arena can be a very long and drawn out affair, as you will all learn soon enough, so I will not bore you with the details. Now I trust that all of you will remember well what you have learned here today. My guards will now escort you to your new living quarters. That will be all.” She turned and without further ado marched solemnly off the stage and out of sight.

As soon as she turned to leave, the diesels of the lizards all came to life nearly simultaneously, as if on cue in a well-choreographed drama of death. O’Keefe had been gripped too tightly by the gruesome scenes he had just witnessed to notice, but the air in the chamber had somehow been purified during Elorak’s murderous exposition. But now that the lizard’s engines were all rumbling again, the air became noxious in only moments. O’Keefe’s eyes watered as he began to wheeze and cough anew.

He looked to his two companions. Steenini appeared well enough, coughing slightly but otherwise standing stoically at O’Keefe’s side. But to Bart’s right Lindy swayed like a tower on a moving fault line. His eyes were starting to glaze over and roll back in his head. O’Keefe could see that in a moment he would faint away. He reached past Steenini and pulled Lindy to him where he held him up with his left arm. With his right hand he patted Lindy’s cheeks, ever more forcefully, until the pilot’s eyes began to show some alertness and focus.

“Yo, Willet,” he said. “Hang in there, all right? All right!” Lindy nodded, took a deep breath, and reached up to clasp O’Keefe’s right hand. O’Keefe briefly returned his grip before releasing him and finding that the man could now stand on his own.

Meanwhile, the surrounding lizard guards had closed in around the prisoners, pushing them into a jostling mass at the center of the cavern. O’Keefe found himself unable to move more than a few inches in any direction. He watched as one of the guards broke ranks and turned to one side, where two of Elorak’s lackeys pulled a long length of thick cable from the spool of its winch, laying it out across the floor in front of the beast. As soon as the men scampered out of the way it clanked forward until the cable was stretched out behind it and another of Elorak’s favorites was able to push it into a collapsible eyehook that protruded from beneath the rear of the guard’s armored chassis. All of Elorak’s toadies then gathered round the right tread of the lizard where one of their number opened a steel tool box that was welded to the fender and began to pass out handcuffs that he retrieved from within. Upon receiving a pair, each lackey squeezed between the guards surrounding the prisoners and culled a man from the crowd, who they then fettered behind the lone, outlying lizard with one ring of the cuffs around a wrist and the other locked through small hoops of steel that had been built into the cable at regular intervals. The men were attached one by the right wrist and the next by the left.

When the cable had no more open rings to cuff through, the reptile roared off toward the wall of the chamber, while another deserted the perimeter to follow behind, just on the heels of the men in tow. A section of the wall opened outward at the guard’s approach, and the procession rumbled off into a passageway at a speed that forced the prisoners to trot.

Another guard left the circle surrounding the men and had the cable from its winch locked in place just at the first had. More men were taken from the crowd, cuffed, and then dragged away.

As the process of removing the prisoners from the auditorium continued the lizard guards indulged in much whip cracking, guttural orders, and puerile insults. Replacement reptiles arrived or perhaps returned to the cavern in a random fashion, but there were always more than enough of them to keep the ring of steel surrounding the prisoners intact. Any audible comments from the men were answered instantly by the sting of a lash while several who were unfortunate enough to raise the ire of one of the beasts were speared and killed. O’Keefe could see no method to the beasts’ madness. The murdered men had not appeared to be behaving differently than any other prisoner. Apparently the lizards simply enjoyed killing every so often, as each death brought a chorus of basso guffaws from deep in their throats.

Shortly O’Keefe, Steenini, and Lindy were among a group cut from the crush of bodies. The unspeaking lackeys cuffed each of them behind a waiting guard as it idled outside the ring of its comrades. O’Keefe stood by, standing slightly bent over with his shoulders slumped, trying hard to hide his eight inch height advantage over the tallest of the Akadeans. But there was no way to cover his pale complexion. He looked nothing like the other prisoners. He expected to be singled out at any moment by a guard or one of the lackeys. But they paid no heed to his aberrant features, as he simply stood unmolested while more and more men were manacled to the cable that now hung from his left wrist.
Perhaps they are used to strangers,
he mused. After all, as he had learned for the UP network, they enslaved every being that they came across. There was no telling how many strange species populated their prisons. Shortly, a last man was attached at the butt end of the line, and the lizard roared off, pulling the cable taut and quickly settling the men into a jog.

They entered a passageway. It was a dimly lit tunnel of the same rough cut rock that seemed to make up the entire complex. It was easily wide enough for two of the guards to pass each other in opposite directions, but when that did indeed happen, invariably one or both of the guards would scrape the wall or strike a glancing blow against the other, adding new blemishes to their already marred hulls. The diesel fumes, which had been acrid in the auditorium, were stifling in the tunnel. The lizard’s exhaust blew from beneath its undercarriage, so the men were forced to run through a cloud of it continuously. There was much violent hacking and expectorated sputum as they struggled to keep their breath in the midst of the poisoned air. Steenini fell once and was dragged by his arm for a short distance before he could once again get to his feet and resume trotting. O’Keefe could see that blood ran from both his knees down the front of his legs, but he, being chained out of reach, had been powerless to do anything to help.

The tunnel seemed to stretch into eternity. Occasionally the towing guard thundered through intersections with other passageways, but the crossings never caused the pace to slacken. O’Keefe was able to keep up despite the ache in his chest that spiked when he gasped for air; the months of endless exercise on
Vigilant
were now paying dividends that he could never have envisioned at the time. It was clear that others were failing, however, as the rigors of the passage to Ashawzut began to exact their toll. Many of the men were being pulled along by the cable, their bound arm outstretched rigidly before them and their legs with barely the strength to keep them from falling. Trails of spittle hung from the corners of their mouths. From time to time little strings of it were shaken away by the violent shocks sent through their bodies as their boot clad feet pounded down the stone floor of the corridors.

Just when O’Keefe felt that the men around him would begin to collapse and be dragged, the towing guard slowed and ground to a halt just past an arched and doorless opening in the side of the passageway. A number—121—was graven deeply into the rock beside the breach. The men’s shackles all popped open simultaneously and the cable, handcuffs and all, was reeled back onto the lizard’s winch. It then spun around on its treads and faced the men. “Inside,” it barked. “And stay there. If caught outside quarters, punishment is sure.”

“Let me hazard a guess,” O’Keefe muttered weakly, “that the penalty for that would be death.”

“Silence!” bellowed the reptile that had been bringing up the rear. O’Keefe immediately dodged to his left, knowing the whip would follow the word. It did, cracking beside his right shoulder as he moved. Before the creature could draw back for another strike O’Keefe darted through the opening in the wall and out of reach. The guard roared in anger and pushed its way forward until the front of its hull was flush against both sides of the doorway. It stuck its long necked head and arms into the room only to find O’Keefe well out of reach, even of the whip. The enraged lizard flailed its weapon at him several times anyway before it realized the futility of its actions, yet still its tracks scraped uselessly against the stone floor outside as it strained to move forward. But the wall between the room and the passageway was solid rock and too thick for even a tracked vehicle to break through. Finally the lividly confounded creature sought to reach behind its neck for a spear but found that action too to be thwarted by the relative smallness of the doorway. At length it bared its teeth at O’Keefe and roared fearsomely, “I not forget you, human,” before withdrawing and finally allowing the other men to enter.