The Empty Warrior (79 page)
Authors: J. D. McCartney
With his one good arm, O’Keefe painfully pushed himself to his knees, but could not stand. He labored merely to breathe, each attempt at respiration sending sharp stabs of torment through his chest and shoulder.
There’s no way
, he thought.
I can’t even get to my feet, much less aim. How am I going to put a bullet into the shield vortex before she and her robot splatter me?
He closed his eyes as he tottered there, struggling even as he knelt to keep his balance.
Oh Lord
, he silently prayed,
help me. Give me the strength. Just one more minute is all I need.
He opened his eyes. Elorak still stood only a few yards away. He reached deliberately down into his breechclout, his hand finding the cold and now bloody steel of the Colt. He twined his fingers round the barrel, using one to push the safety down into the firing position. He tried to draw the weapon, but the grip caught between his legs. When he attempted to simply manhandle the gun up and out into his hands the barrel became enmeshed in the fold of fabric where the diaper was held tightly around his waist. It suddenly became clear to him that in his depleted condition he was incapable of freeing the weapon from its hiding place. He dimly realized he should have thought about this eventuality before. He should have modified the diaper, should have changed the position the gun, should have done something. But now it was too late.
Seeing him with his hand stuffed down between his legs, Elorak’s lips twisted into a cruel expression of disgust. “You worthless piece of filth,” she said, misunderstanding. “I give you a chance for dignity, and you would rather die with your hand on your genitals. So be it!” She reached for the blaster on the side of her boot.
O’Keefe felt Regulus explode. The big dog launched instantly from where he sat at the edge of the arena floor into a full sprint—tail horizontal, back straight, head level, limbs rhythmically propelling him forward faster than seemed possible for an animal of his size. Elorak caught sight of him out of the corner of her eye and hesitated, blaster in hand, turning slightly to see. Her machine protector sensed the dog’s movement as well. Regulus was not yet close enough to trigger its proximity defenses, and the robot’s programming would not allow it to fire before then on what was, to its computer brain, an ally. But it did rotate, its weapon systems locked on and tracking Regulus as he barreled across the arena.
O’Keefe observed the slight movement of the canister-like machine. Intuitively, he knew the rotation signified death for Regulus. The sight sent lightning shooting through his ganglia, his adrenal gland pulsed epinephrine once more, and puissance erupted in his thews. Again his senses heightened. This time they were tuned to an even higher pitch than before, his mental union with Regulus expanding his perceptions to a level never before possible. He could see the eyes of the dragons at the edge of the arena looking on uncomprehendingly. He could sense the muscles tensing in the hips of the pack as they prepared to launch themselves at the dragons’ throats. He could discern clearly the pattern of wrinkles in Elorak’s leather gloves and boots, could feel the electric wrath of her shielding. He wrenched the pistol out from the breechclout with newfound strength, incognizant of the agony that the effort sent screaming through his shoulder, unaware of the bellow that roared from between his lips. Spinning the gun in his hands until it pointed away from him, he wrapped his palm around the stock, releasing the grip safety, before using his thumb to pull the hammer back into the full cocked position. He knew, deep in his brain, that Regulus had veered away ever so slightly. He was now heading directly for the assault robot rather than Elorak. The dog knew that O’Keefe had drawn the Colt, and he meant to distract the machine long enough, by sacrificing himself, for O’Keefe to kill the Slayer with it. But that just didn’t fit into O’Keefe’s plans. Leveling the barrel and aiming at the top of the cylindrical robot, he squeezed the trigger. The bullet exploded from the barrel as Regulus was a mere stride from entering the machine’s killing zone. It impacted the metal side of the canister a millisecond before the command to fire was processed and dispatched through its circuitry. The bullet tore through the robot, wreaking havoc amidst its mechanical bowels, but not crippling it. Redundancies and backups instantly came on line and the unit continued to function.
But the impact moved it. Its stabilizers and antigravs were designed to deal with energy weapons, not the forces imparted by a forty-five caliber slug. As the bullet hit, the machine swung wildly to a near forty degree angle as it fired. Because of that the blast it aimed at Regulus went wide to the right, and by then Regulus was airborne. Before the robot could right itself and fire again, his powerful jaws closed around it and snatched it from the air, crushing it even as his big paws hit the floor. Then in typical canine fashion he took the robot and, shaking his head wildly, beat the machine repeatedly against the stone of the arena floor as bits of plastic and metal spewed from it in every direction. And all around the floor the pack heaved themselves upward, their mighty jaws and stalwart, carnivorous teeth closing around the exposed throats of bewildered dragons.
Elorak was momentarily stunned by the unexpected attack. She had turned away from O’Keefe to watch Regulus and stood as if frozen while the alpha smashed her protector. In only a moment she came to her senses, but it was time she did not have. O’Keefe had only to drop the barrel of the pistol two inches and she was in his sights. As she raised her blaster to take aim at Regulus, he loosed a second shot. It caught her directly between the shoulder blades. Her body shield protected her from the killing power of the bullet, but the simple physics of the blow knocked her face down to the floor.
She quickly rolled and turned to face O’Keefe, but as she did so, a shadow passed over the Earther from behind. It was Shaula. Landing between O’Keefe and Elorak, she raced by the Vazilek’s right side, deftly taking the woman’s blaster in her teeth and tearing it from the grip of her gloved hand. The dog raced away with it toward the far side of the arena. Hatred flamed across Elorak’s countenance.
She pulled the serrated knife—the same knife that had emasculated so many new inmates—from the sheath at her thigh and, still sure of her invulnerability, smiled wickedly at O’Keefe. Then cat quick, faster than he found conceivable for a woman with artificial limbs, she was on her feet, charging toward him with murder in her eyes. She took a step, then two, while O’Keefe steadied the Colt. The vortex at her throat was less than five feet away. Her arm was already drawn back to thrust the lethal shank into his chest when he pulled the trigger, spinning his last bullet away from the barrel amidst the gases from the burning propellant. It tracked toward its target at a rate that even Elorak’s mechanically enhanced reflexes could not foil. But the slug was aimed imperfectly. It was not going to hit the middle of the generator as O’Keefe had intended. It was slightly off target, an inch or two at most. But O’Keefe had no way of knowing that, and in the end it made no difference. The sides of the shield vortex, rather than absorbing the impact, channeled the bullet directly into the center of the shield generator. The irresistible force of the bullet’s impact shattered it and drove its wreckage, along with the steel collar that had held it, back into Elorak’s throat and through the flesh of her neck, snapping her spine and decapitating the woman as a wide spray of blood and tissue fanned out behind her.
The inertia of her body was largely mitigated by the impact, but her legs still pushed her trunk forward with enough force to collide with O’Keefe and knock him down once more, his cranium solidly impacting the arena floor. Elorak’s knife danced across the stone behind him, beyond where her body had cartwheeled to rest. Her head landed a few feet away, at an angle that allowed him, for the first time, to look into her unshielded eyes. The last things he saw before the pain engulfed him and his mind sank gratefully into unconsciousness were her lips moving with no voice and the look of incomprehension that was spread across her face. It was a face that he could now see for what it was, a face bereft of the soft focus her shield had hitherto always provided, a face scarred by an inept rehabilitation from some dreadful scorching. The same burning had probably taken her limbs. For a moment O’Keefe almost, but not quite, pitied her.
Lindy stood woodenly in the second level of the arena, stoically preparing to watch his friend die. The tiny hope that had been reignited within him when he learned of O’Keefe’s unlikely alliance with the dogs had been crushed when Elorak announced that the aberrant was to be forced into a fight to the death with the guard Manka. It seemed that all was lost. Ultimately he found he could not bring himself to watch the horrific scene unfolding on the floor below. Instead he sank to the stone between his fellow inmates, hugging his knees to his chest and hiding his head between them, his eyes gazing dumbly down at the steps on which he sat. Even as the murmurs of the crowd mutated to excited chatter and then to roaring cheers he could not find the will to stand and watch the contest. It was only when Steenini grabbed him under the armpits and hoisted him erect amidst the wildly screaming prisoners did he comprehend what had happened. The guard lay dead in the arena, its own dagger protruding from its skull, and Elorak now marched confidently toward O’Keefe, just as the Earther had planned all along.
Moments later she was dead, her assault robot crushed and broken into scrap while the dogs had turned on the guards. Despite their armored hulls and thick, scaly skin; they stood no chance against the onslaught of the ferocious hounds. They were vastly outnumbered, taken by surprise, and armed only with whips and spears; they were no match for the fleet agility, gnashing teeth, and coordinated pack tactics of the mentally connected dogs. In only minutes the lizards were torn from their machine bases and left to die, bloody, on the arena floor. Some few escaped into the tunnels, but Lindy was certain they would not last long, because now, along with the dogs, men released from the arena cages were pouring onto the stadium floor and out into the colony complex proper. Some few of them were arming themselves with whatever they could find—picks, shovels, kitchen utensils, anything. It was clear that soon any remaining guards would be slain.
In the middle of the arena O’Keefe still lay crumpled on the stone, unmoving. He was either unconscious or dead. But if life still stirred in him, he was more than adequately protected. One of the largest of the dogs—the black one that had mangled the assault robot—stood over him bellowing and barking fiercely, its body a bulwark between the aberrant and harm. In short order O’Keefe was surrounded by an ever growing circle of the beasts. They stood shoulder to shoulder and all faced outward, snarling viciously at anyone who dared approach them.
“Come on,” Lindy yelled to Steenini, breaking free from the trancelike state that had held them both rooted to the rock beneath them. “We’ve got to get down there.” Not waiting for an answer, he grabbed Steenini by the shirt and pulled him up the stairs toward the now open gate.
But the going was far from easy. Throngs of men milled about the exits, celebrating. The air was filled with the sound of human voices; some shouting, some laughing, some gibbering, some sobbing. Everyone, with the possible exception of Elorak’s toadies, was ecstatic at her demise and their newfound freedom, yet utterly unsure of what to do with it. It took Lindy and Steenini several minutes simply to make their way from their place in the stands out into the corridors. Once there, they had no idea how to find their way down to the arena floor.
A flash of inspiration kindled in Lindy. He turned and shouted at Steenini in order to make himself heard over the din that surrounded them. “We need to find one of the dogs. They seem to know every corner of this place.”
But try as they might, they could suddenly find none of the beasts. The whole of the canine horde seemed to have disappeared. At last they made their way to a side passage and, looking down it, saw three dogs sitting abreast of each other across its width. They did not appear to be guarding the corridor, seeming more disinterested and aloof than alert and vicious. But neither did they give ground at the approach of the two men. When both Akadeans were standing directly before them, Lindy addressed them earnestly, but carefully. There was still a great deal of suspicion in his heart for the huge animals. “We need your help,” he said. “We need to get to Hill, the man who slew the guard in the arena. Can you take us to him?”
The animals made no sign of reply, merely cocking their heads, raising their ears and looking at the two men quizzically. Lindy tried again. “We are his friends. He is injured and needs our help. We must go to him. Someone must treat his wounds. Do you understand?” Again there was no immediate sign that the dogs understood at all, but momentarily, the center canine made a series of whining noises interspersed with guttural rumbles and growls. Then it stood, turned, and retreated down the passage. Lindy made a move to follow but was stopped as the two remaining dogs closed ranks to block his way. They further pressed home their point by remonstrating with bared teeth and raised hackles until Lindy retreated a few steps.
“Come on,” Steenini said, impatient. “We’re not going to get anywhere with them. We’ll have to find the way on our own.” He turned to walk back up the passageway.
“No, wait,” Lindy called after him. “Wait a minute!” Steenini halted and turned to face him. “That dog understood everything I said, I’m sure of it,” the pilot said. “I think it went to check on something. Wait here for a while and see if it doesn’t come back.”
