Authors: J. D. McCartney
The Empty Warrior (14 page)
Just as suddenly he became aware of the object that had cut off his line of sight. The sheer bulk of its dark shape and the soundlessness of its descent had kept him from seeing it at first. It was enormous. Some forty feet tall and at least two hundred feet wide, it looked like a giant black plate placed inverted atop another, only rounded at its edges. It hovered over the surface of the lake as solidly as if it were held by a giant vise, and yet it was utterly silent. Light suddenly radiated from a point on the far side of the craft, illuminating the shore. O’Keefe discovered that he could see under the thing on both sides where its body tapered out from the thicker, central core. A ramp extended from the same area as the light. He could see the legs of the people on the shore as they began to trudge up the ramp carrying in the boxes they had previously been unloading from the trucks.
“Good Lord,” O’Keefe whispered to himself. “It’s a goddamned flying saucer!”
Valessanna Nelkris paced. She knew it drove the bridge crew to distraction, but at present she was worried enough to be beyond caring. The acquisition team on the surface was in grave danger, which in truth was nothing out of the ordinary since they had been in harm’s way for weeks. But over the next half hour or so the danger they faced would be elevated exponentially. By now, they should have all reached the isolated lake that had been chosen as the extraction site, where the barge would drop from orbit and recover the team and their precious assemblage of purloined knowledge. It was the last but most perilous part of their mission. For the first time since their arrival on the planet, this was the one place where they would all converge, the one moment when they would have no believable cover story, the one point they were the most apt to be discovered. The barge was shielded well enough to deflect any sensor technology that it might encounter, but it was not wholly invisible. If someone were to see it descend and decided to sound an alarm, it could very well mean death for everyone involved. After all, the aberrants were nothing if not efficient when it came to parceling out murder and mayhem. And since Valessanna was powerless to do anything on the team’s behalf besides wait, she paced.
She held her arms tightly behind her ruler straight back, her right hand clamped vise-like around her left wrist, while she traced an imaginary line with her footsteps from port to starboard and then back. Presently she halted and turned to face aft. Before her were two elevated and heavily padded chairs; her own, empty and on the right; and the officer of the deck’s, occupied and on the left. Sitting in the OOD’s chair was Colvan Busht, her executive officer. She stared at him. “Well, are they down yet?” she growled.
Busht looked up from the monitor that the chair projected before his eyes and regarded her from beneath a furrowed brow. “No Val,” he said softly, patiently. “Deckar is still in orbit. The recon cutter has just now moved on station. As soon as I get the all clear from Lindy, I’ll send the barge down to retrieve the team.” Valessanna did not release him from her glare, which prompted a post script from the exec. “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly, “everything is going exactly as planned.” With that he went back to following their progress on his monitor.
Valessanna felt a bilious surge of irrational pique rising in her throat in response to the dismissive attitude displayed by an officer her junior in rank and under her command, but she fought the impulse to let fly a sharp retort. That urge, that sudden desire to direct spasms of anger at those around her in times of stress, was just one of the inner demons that she had carried with her for a lifetime. It had been a great hindrance to her early in her spacefaring career. But now, centuries removed from her initial forays into the cosmos, she had developed considerable self-control and was, in the end, successful at preserving the appropriate decorum for a commanding officer. It was bad enough for the state of the crew’s collective temperament to be witnessing their captain as nervous as a first time bride about to meet her future in-laws, but it might very well be ruinous for morale if they were allowed to see two senior officers having it out on the bridge. The passing of a few seconds was enough for the totality of her ire to evaporate.
Then, once more on an emotional even keel, she was forced to admit to herself that, despite her deep-seated feelings of unease concerning the acquisition team and their safe return to the ship, Busht was in fact correct. There was absolutely no logical, concrete reason for any distress at present.
That was why Busht had shipped out as her exec on a dozen consecutive cruises. They made a good team. Alone, his dispassionate temper would have made for a happy but lackadaisical crew, and without him to buffer them from her fiery perfectionism, Valessanna was certain that half of the
Vigilant’s
complement would have already resigned from the service. But the fusion of their styles had forged a ship with both excellent morale and utter competence. Under their command the
Vigilant
had accrued a well-deserved reputation of being one of the finest cruisers in the fleet. That, in large part, was why the ship had been chosen for this mission.
Valessanna did a quick about face and looked forward—quick enough to catch several heads swiveling back to concentrate on their duties. Some of the crew had obviously been observing her interchange with the exec rather than monitoring their consoles. Predictably, the impulse to snap at them rose instantly to the forefront of her consciousness; but again, rather than giving it release, she satisfied herself with an imperious, grunting, “Humph.” She felt sure the crew got the message.
There were less than a dozen of them on the bridge at present, seated here and there, leaving most of the thirty-six command stations unoccupied. The stations were arranged in three progressive arcs of consoles that mirrored and faced three large viewscreens mounted on the convexly curving forward bulkhead. The most important stations, such as navigation and communication, were situated on the third row from the front, the shortest row, which was also closest to the captain’s chair. Those deemed to be of lesser importance were on the middle arc of consoles while the least critical were arrayed along the longer front row.
On the forward bulkhead, only one of viewscreens, the center one, was active. Directly at its midpoint hung a real-time and highly magnified representation of a brilliant blue globe set against the darkness of the void. The sight sent a chill down Valessanna’s spine. The world was lovely from this distance, but its beauty hid almost unimaginable horrors. It was the third planet in the Sol system, the only planet in the galaxy to be off limits even to police vessels. Union ships heretofore allowed to enter this system came only on specially authorized scientific missions, conducting their investigations from high orbits, using unmanned reconnaissance drones for any close-in work, the ships’ crews being strictly forbidden to set foot on the surface, and for good reason.
Bizarre behaviors had cropped up on many human-inhabited worlds during the long Dark Age that followed the Cataclysm at Akadea; but they were for the most part harmless eccentricities that had given their respective worlds character and a sense of individuality. However, Sol Three was grossly more unique. Here, the population had sunk so deeply into depravity that their behavior had caused the very word
aberrant
to attain new and wholly sinister connotations. It was used in descriptions of the inhabitants more like a classification or a title than a noun or an adjective. The people of this world had deviated so far from human norms that they were not known as members of an aberrant population, or denizens of an aberrant world, but simply as “aberrants.” If one spoke of “aberrants” on any world in the Union, there was no mistaking to whom one referred.
For Sol Three was a world where violence inflicted against one human being by another was every day fare; a world where life was short and any regard for it almost nonexistent. The people that inhabited the orb killed each other in droves on every rotation. And yet beyond even the commonplace carnage, the planet was subject to recurrent paroxysms of organized violence that at times left millions dead in their wake. It was savagery far beyond anything seen anywhere else in the galaxy.
Thus it was natural for the aberrants to be universally feared. Their ever increasing slide into the abyss of madness was the stuff of the rest of the galaxy’s worst nightmares. And now Valessanna’s people were down there in the midst of them. She tried to swallow but found her mouth too dry. Trepidation flowed into her limbs anew, this time to an even greater degree than before. Unbidden by conscious thought, her feet again began to mechanically tread the unseen line from starboard to port and back.
Adding to her anxiety was the fact that no one knew precisely how much danger a corporeal visit to the aberrant world actually entailed. This was, after all, the first time since the rediscovery that it had been done. Extensive surveys and monitoring had been undertaken of the emissions that radiated from the planet, which had enabled the Union to suitably translate several of the dominant languages that were spoken there. But the transmissions were filled with such a volume of contradictions, obvious half truths, and utter fictions that even the immense amount of words and images that had been collected left scholars able to reach very few definitive conclusions about the place other than it was violent and dangerous, facts patently obvious to even the most casual observer. The overriding question of why this was so had never been suitably answered.
No one knew what long-ago events had triggered the aberrants’ descent into barbarism. And since the cause of the mass insanity remained indeterminate; contagion, psychological or otherwise, had always been greatly feared. Even in a society that prided itself on its citizens’ free access to information, only the most generic research concerning the aberrants was available to non-scientists. The bulk of the knowledge was hidden away, to be perused only by state-monitored scholars. It had been decided long ago that the less the general population knew about the aberrant world, the safer the rest of the galaxy would be.
So to most Akadeans the aberrants remained a faraway and shadowy source of dread and concern as it was known to practically everyone, albeit nearly exclusively through gossip and rumor, that the barbarians’ technological capabilities were moving forward at an alarming pace. It had been theorized that their limited lifespans had, over the centuries, endowed them with a drive to achieve that was far more intense than that possessed by normal human beings. But whatever the cause, the meteoric rise of their scientific prowess far outstripped anything ever seen on other planets seeded by Akadeans.
At Valessanna’s birth they had been hard pressed to cross their world’s oceans, and yet now they had the wherewithal to send forth limited exploratory missions throughout their star system. It seemed certain to be only a matter of time before they learned to traverse the vastness of space, and then the genie would truly be out of the bottle and there would be no capping it. Nothing would contain them at that point. On the day they became interstellar spacefarers, the galaxy would transform into an unthinkably dangerous place. That was another good reason for the laws against contact, Valessanna felt. Keeping them restricted to their own world might be impossible in the long run, but there was no reason to take the chance of helping them along. If the wrong technologies were inadvertently allowed to fall into their hands, the aberrants could very well be roaming the Milky Way in a matter of just a few years.
It was only the dire exigency of the times that had lifted the prohibitions imposed by the Union to allow for this one expedition. Yet even with the predations of the Vazileks now occurring at shorter and shorter intervals, the volunteers of the acquisition team would still be placed in strict quarantine for many months after their return, both on the
Vigilant
and later at a Union psychiatric facility. They would be watched continually for any sign of acquired antisocial or antisocietal behavior. Only after scientists were certain that they were in no way changed would they be allowed a debriefing and real contact with their observers, and a chance to relate exactly what a visit to the aberrant world was like. Hopefully the information that they had pilfered and would be bringing back with them would be of more immediate help.
That was
Vigilant’s
mission here, hard data aggregation. It had been determined long ago that some of the more technologically advanced of the many aberrant governments that held sway over different regions of the fragmented world devoted significant resources to the study of the planet’s recurrent episodes of societal fratricide, even going so far as to establish universities devoted to the study and perpetuation of the phenomenon. It was widely believed among academicians that within these schools and their adjuncts; in the libraries, the networks, and the history books; there could be found hard facts, unequivocal evidence that would paint a clear picture of the aggressive nature of the aberrants. What was needed was the unvarnished truth of how their conflicts were initiated, how they were conducted, and most importantly how each was eventually brought to an end. It was the hope of everyone involved in the project that this knowledge would somehow give the Union the key to opening a dialogue with the Vazileks and ultimately stop their more or less constant brigandage.
Thus the acquisition team had been formed, trained, equipped, and put aboard
Vigilant
. Then they had been brought to Sol Three, set down off the eastern coast of the continent that produced by far the most electromagnetic emissions, making it at least appear to be the most advanced area on the planet, and left on their own to accomplish their objectives. They had landed on the planet twenty-nine days ago. Now only a few minutes remained before the barge would be bringing them and the information they had plundered back aboard. Then
Vigilant
could turn her slender nose away from this nondescript little star and let her mighty engines take her and her crew far away from this accursed system, back to the Union, and home. It couldn’t come soon enough for Valessanna.