The Empty Warrior (31 page)

And yet none of what the Akadeans were doing made any sense to him. They had apparently taken considerable risk to rescue him and then gone to great lengths to heal him, only to make him a prisoner once that was done. Now they were intent on giving him the best body their medical science could provide, but to what end? They were so fearful of him they wouldn’t let him leave his quarters without immobilizing the very body they were so resolutely improving. He could see no logic to their actions at all, and that unnerved him. He was convinced that in the end there would come a time for pay back, that at some point in the future the Akadeans would make it clear what they expected of him in return for their magnanimity. But O’Keefe reasoned that as long as they continued to repair even his most trifling imperfections, he would be better served to not complain or ask too many questions. If there was a price to be paid later, he would deal with any Akadean demands when they were finally made clear to him.

And there was also his growing attraction to Pellotte, whose visits made his confinement all the more bearable. He had not been both sexually potent and able to spend time with a female in about four decades, and the woman was really getting under his skin. Each day that she left him alone in his room he ached for her return more avidly than he had the day before.

So it was with anticipation and near joy that he practically bounded out of his sleeping room one evening upon hearing the door chime that announced arrivals. But instead of his nurse bringing him his dinner, he bounced into the main room of his quarters only to see the same woman who had been such a ball-buster with Beccassit on the day he had awakened in sick bay. She stood just inside his doorway, an aura of command surrounding her, while the two ever-present guards stood close behind. O’Keefe searched his memory for a name, recalling distinctly that the doctor had addressed her as Mrs. so and so, but the moniker would not come to him.

She appeared to be young, not much more than a girl, but looks were deceiving when it came to the Akadeans. Their ability to move their gray matter into cloned, empty skulled bodies turned O’Keefe’s concept of aging on its head. The woman might be seven centuries old for all he knew. Beccassit had confided to him that some Akadeans had been through enough bodies to be well over a thousand. The doctor claimed to be nearly five hundred years old himself. O’Keefe guessed that his visitor was much older than she looked, based on her peremptory attitude and the way others deferred to her, but still he gauged her to be considerably younger than Beccassit. He had gotten the fuzzy impression from his limited contact with Pellotte that most older Akadeans stayed home while it was the younger ones who roamed the stars attempting to police the galaxy.

The woman held her arms tightly crossed, three fingers on one hand drumming lightly on her opposite elbow. She looked him up and down through steady brown eyes and then surveyed the room, her strong profile displaying a determined chin and a long, but still feminine, nose. Her severe mouth seemed as immovable as stone, her lips frozen and pressed together into a firm, thin line that cut across her face.

The gold uniform she wore looked identical to what the ship’s first officer had been dressed in at his one meeting with O’Keefe, only her’s was adorned with more insignia, specifically an array of jewel encrusted starbursts over her heart.

At last she spoke. “Mr. O’Keefe, I am Valessanna Nelkris, captain of the
Vigilant
. Dr. Beccassit has informed me that you have been fairly well returned to good health and that you are speaking our language with aplomb. That being the case, I believe that now it is time we became better acquainted.”

Horseshit
, O’Keefe thought. This wasn’t a social call; she had come to pass judgment. Her tightly wound demeanor had his every instinct screaming that belief into his brain even before she had spoken. And now that she had, that belief grew even stronger.

But as she continued to stand just past the threshold and study him intently, his assessment of the situation abruptly shifted. She had come to judge him all right, but it was rather more of an appraisal than a verdict. She looked at him in the skeptical way that a persnickety owner of a classic car would scrutinize a potential mechanic before allowing him to perform work on a treasured possession. As he had foreseen, the Akadeans expected something from him, some kind of service or favor in return for their healing. The captain had not come to his ornate jail cell for the purpose of “getting acquainted.” She had more likely come looking for recompense. There was something she wanted, and she was right now trying to determine if he was capable of providing it. O’Keefe shivered just a bit at the thought of what kind of undertaking the Akadean captain might desire from someone she obviously considered to be a lesser human. Whatever she wanted, O’Keefe had a distinctly bad feeling that it would not be in his own best interests.

This is the last straw
, he thought. Like she had said, he was in perfect health now. There was nothing to be gained by continuing to play along with his jailers. The time had come to stop trying to be so damn nice to the little fuckers and get in someone’s face a bit.

“Well, that’s great, captain,” he began. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting more of the ship’s crew. And I want to say first of all that I appreciate everything you guys have done for me as far as saving my life and fixing me up. I really do. But on the other hand, it
was
your little foray into my solar system that almost got me killed. If your people hadn’t been nosing around my property none of this would have ever happened.

“And I’ve also got to tell you, I take some exception to the way I’ve been treated on this ship. It seems I’m not allowed to leave these rooms. There are always guards at my door. The only two people that will actually speak to me will answer damn few of my questions, and as hard as it may be for you to believe, I have a lot of them. You people keep saying that I am a guest here, but I feel very much like a prisoner, and I don’t like it much. You, being the captain, could change all that, could you not?”

O’Keefe stared down at her until she was forced to drop her eyes. “Perhaps,” she said softly, as she walked with what appeared to be carefully crafted ease to a spot behind one of the overstuffed chairs. “But that depends on you.”

“Yeah,” O’Keefe said, “somehow I figured it would.” As he spoke the woman circled the chair and elegantly took a seat, crossing her legs demurely at the knee. Her spine touched the back of the upholstery, but her arms still hugged her body and her back remained ramrod straight.

“Take a seat, Mr. O’Keefe, if you don’t mind,” she said, gesturing toward the matching chair at the far end of the cocktail table. He reluctantly did as she suggested, feeling as if he were taking orders, and was painfully conscious that in comparison to her movements he more or less flopped awkwardly down onto the thick cushion. He composed himself, straightening his spine as well so his head remained well above hers, and he purposely kept his knees widely spaced, a silent reminder of his maleness even in the face of her authority.

He waited for her to speak again, but she merely sat and studied him thoughtfully. When he felt he had waited long enough, and began to chafe uncomfortably under her gaze, he cut directly to the chase. “Exactly what is it that you people want from me, captain?” he asked.

She ignored the question. “How did you come to be paralyzed?” she instead inquired pointedly.

The directness of the woman momentarily took O’Keefe aback, and his first thought was to lie, to protect his secrets. But before he could speak he thought better of it. Beccassit’s skills and the technology at his command were beyond impressive. The odds were that the doctor knew from inspecting his old wounds exactly how O’Keefe had been maimed and had already communicated that knowledge to the captain or could at the very least call into question any fabrication that he could come up with on the spur of the moment. There was nothing to be gained by falsifying his answer and everything to lose if the captain were merely testing his honesty.

“I was wounded,” he finally said. “A piece of shrapnel arranged a meeting with my spine. It was in the…” O’Keefe hesitated, searching his implant for a word meaning “war” and finding no corresponding term available. “In Vietnam. I left my hole to go get a wounded man, and I got hit. The next thing I knew I was in a hospital finding out I’d never walk again, or at least so I thought at the time. Our medical expertise is obviously not as advanced as yours.”

The captain stared at him for a long moment, her brow furrowed as if she were trying hard to understand some abstruse concept. Her mien suddenly cleared. “What is Vietnam?” she asked.

“It’s a…,” he paused, again searching for a word. Again he could not find it. The language possessed no word to express the idea of a nationstate. “Principality,” he said at last, using the best word that he could come up with, one that most nearly defined the concept. He went on, struggling to explain. “It’s a separate governmental entity from the other governmental entities on Earth.”

“Ah,” the captain said, the edges of her mouth turning slightly up in understanding. “One of your strange political partitions. But according to our records you were found in the political partition known as the United States of America. You also speak the language prevalent there. Why were you in this, ah…”

“Vietnam?”

“Yes. Why were you in this Vietnam?” She leaned slightly forward in her chair, cocking her head almost imperceptibly to one side. The seemingly inconsequential movement toward him was in fact quite significant, something not lost on O’Keefe, as he implicitly understood that this particular question was of greater than normal import to her. Thus he answered slowly, carefully.

“There was a…conflict. My political partition, the United States, sent me there. To fight.”

“To fight? Or to
kill
?” She drew out the word kill, and leaned even farther in his direction, unfolding her arms and clasping her hands around her uppermost knee.

“Well, both,” O’Keefe exclaimed, aggravated by her condescension. “To fight, to kill, to maybe get killed. Or maybe get mutilated, paralyzed, and confined to a wheelchair.” He did not like the direction the conversation was taking and began to raise his voice slightly. “What is this, anyway, an inquisition? It was a conflict, for…” O’Keefe realized for the hundredth time that the Akadeans had no word; except in an archaic, pagan, and polytheistic sense; for God. “Goodness sakes. That’s what people do in a conflict. They fight, they kill, they get killed.”

“That is what your people do in a conflict, Mr. O’Keefe. As hard as this may be for you to believe,” she said, mimicking the derisive tone of his opening statement, “your customary method of settling disputes is not a universal absolute. It is in fact an aberration.”

“What does that mean?” asked O’Keefe.

“It means institutionalized murder and mayhem is not a societal norm. Of the many thousands of human inhabited planets in this galaxy, only a tiny fraction has ever degenerated into the type of conflicts that are endemic to your Earth, and yours is the only such civilization, and I use that term loosely, that has yet to destroy itself. That puts you in very much the minority position. Don’t you understand why you were not previously aware of our existence? Allow me to enlighten you. It is because you are quarantined from the rest of humanity. None of our people are allowed to visit your home. Even the emissions for our worlds are blocked from reaching yours. You have been deemed too savage even to have knowledge of the greater galaxy. That is why you are a prisoner here. Because of your history, I felt the only prudent course of action open to me was to keep you confined to quarters.” She resumed her initial posture of sitting stiffly in the chair, crossed her arms over her abdomen once more, and again drummed on her elbow with three fingers.

O’Keefe sat speechless, staring at the woman, his mouth hanging loosely open, as his mind gyred in stupefaction. Her words careened about his brain as if caught in a cyclone.
Degenerated
.
Aberration
.
Quarantine
.
Murder
. For the first time in his life he felt a little soiled simply for being human. At length, he literally shook the words from his head and turned his eyes away, looking at the wall until the hypocrisy of her assertion exploded into his consciousness like a howitzer round.

“So what about these Vazileks I keep hearing about?” he asked. “It would not appear that you have been settling your differences with them over crumpets and tea.”

It was the captain’s turn to stare agape at him, and O’Keefe instantly understood that he was supposed to know nothing of the Akadeans’ own problems. But the brief moment of discomfiture fled from her face in an instant.

“They are criminals,” she stated assertively, “engaging in criminal acts. They are not a part of the Union, and in the end they will be arrested or otherwise dealt with. They will not be allowed to disrupt galactic society forever. In any case, our attempts to deal with criminal elements from the outside have absolutely nothing in common with the behavioral patterns we have witnessed on your world.”

“Right,” O’Keefe drawled derisively. “But for petty criminals it sure looks like they did a number on your ship. But that’s not my concern. I don’t care what you and your enemies do or how you propagandize your way out of your behavior with clever wording. I would, however, like to get back to the central question here. What is it you want from
me
?”

The captain ignored him again, and returned to her original line of questioning. “How did your United States of America “send” you to this Vietnam? Your statement sounded as if you were taken there against your will. In our investigations, we have gathered no evidence that would indicate any coercion beyond monetary compensation for such phenomena. Indeed, our studies of your media suggest that in your culture participation in conflicts of this sort is glorified, at times even ritualized as part of the transition from child to man. Explain this to me. How and why did you find yourself in the political partition of Vietnam?”