The Empty Warrior (47 page)

O’Keefe felt a pang of conscience. It was a feeling he wasn’t used to experiencing. For decades his own misfortunes had so far surpassed that of the few people he came into contact with that he had never felt much need to watch his tongue for fear of evoking some painful memory. He was accustomed to others stumbling over their words while trying to negotiate the minefield of his hurts, but he rarely if ever had found himself in the same position. And yet now suddenly it was he who had come lunging through the captain’s armored façade like a lance thrusting into an old, deep, and never healing wound. He felt like an unthinking child roughly chasing a ball through a neighbor’s treasured garden, crushing the painstakingly cultivated blooms as he went, and only upon retrieving his toy turning to see the damage that he had wrought. He took another long sip of the emerdal, cursing himself as he did so, and thinking of a similar faux pas in
Vigilant’s
arboretum with Pellotte.

Not really knowing how to apologize, he attempted a slight change of subject instead. “So tell me about him. What was he like? How did you meet?” If speaking of his death was still such a bane to her, O’Keefe reasoned, perhaps speaking of his life would provide a balm.

There was another short moment of silence, but when the captain’s voice floated back to him it came like a soft breeze, as if she were speaking to the night rather than to him. “I met Kebler on the job,” she said. “We were both in the Cartographic Corps. I was captain of the
Traverser
, and he came aboard as the head cartographer for a mission that was to strike out beyond the outer rim. It was dangerous; there were of course no charts of anything out where we were going, so it demanded the utmost in cooperation between the cartographers and the crews. There were two other ships assigned to accompany us. Usually there would have been more, but since it was pure exploration, with no real commercial value at stake, there was just the three of us. We would be gliding along sub-light, with every sensor aboard working overtime, while the
Examiner
and the
Curious
leapfrogged us. We would capture a drone from the lead ship and the cartographers would download the information the other ships had gathered. Then we would deep drive, passing the others, until we were just at the point where we had no more spatial data than that of the light generated by the stars. There we would go sub-light, scan the area around us and drop a buoy to monitor that parcel of space, dispatch our own drone back to the trailing ship, and start the whole process over again. We would go on like that for days on end.

“The danger, of course, is all in the deep driving. If the map boys make a mistake on their coordinates, or the crews make a navigational error, a ship can end up flying off into unknown space at many times the speed of light. There’s a lot of emptiness out there, but at the kind of velocities we move it isn’t too awfully hard to find something to hit when you travel outside of mapped shipping lanes. That’s why we are lucky to be here.
Vigilant
did just that in our escape from your world.

“Anyway, on a survey mission like that, there is generally one group of cartographers for each watch on each ship. They work as a team for the length of the assignment, the theory being that the better each party knows the other the more efficient and less hazardous the work becomes. On most missions it goes without saying that the head cartographer works the same watch as the senior captain for the mission, so Kebler normally would have been aboard the
Curious
and working alongside Belker. But Kebler went against convention during that particular survey. He insisted on berthing aboard the
Traverser
, and further insisted on working my watch.” The captain paused there for a moment, a hint of amusement crossing her face.

“I think everyone on the expedition knew what he was up to, but still it took him forever to get around to it. Well, in truth, he never did get around to it. He was trying to act so professional when really all he was doing was procrastinating. We had been out for about a month when I finally got tired of waiting. I asked him to go for a bite once our watch was over, and as soon as we were alone in the lift I took things into my own hands, so to speak. Then he had to make a decision. He had to either run away or come along for the ride, and he wasn’t going to run. All I can say is that it was a good thing I had enough rank to stop the lift in mid-transit or some of the crew might have gotten an eyeful when the doors opened. And we were a couple from then on.

“We were married a few months after the mission was done. He sold his condominium in the clouds on D’mirnoch and moved here to be with me. Not that his place was in any way undesirable, mind you; but the land here in the forest has been in my family for generations, for thousands of years, and I certainly wasn’t going to give that up. And we were happy, deliriously so, until it was time to ship out again. After that we never had much time to spend together. The corps tried to be accommodating, but there was only so much they could do. We always managed to find a few weeks out of the year to spend together here, but otherwise it was catch as catch can. We would see each other for a few days in one spot and then for a few days somewhere else. But it was always the same. Just about the time we were getting comfortable with each other again, it would be time to say goodbye.

“But it hardly seemed so important then. I always thought we had plenty of time. He was barely seventy years my senior; we should have had centuries together. But then there was his last mission. He was aboard the
Pathfinder
, a brand new ship on her maiden cruise. No one knows what happened. There were several ships assigned to the squadron, all of them leapfrogging as usual, but when it was the
Pathfinder’s
turn to deep drive, she didn’t reappear where she was supposed to. The other vessels searched for days but could find no trace of her. No distress calls, no drones; as I said, nothing at all. That was nearly six years ago now. I can’t believe it’s been that long.” The captain halted her narrative and sat motionless, still staring out into the dark, lost in her private reverie.

Suddenly she looked directly at O’Keefe, her vulnerability vanishing. The habitual veil of sternness with which she usually cloaked her countenance closed over her face like a hastily drawn theater curtain. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she said as if irritated. “What do you care of my life and my troubles? I shouldn’t be whining and going on like some forty-year old girl prattling on about her first love.”

Ordinarily, what she had said about O’Keefe would have been true. For the large majority of his life O’Keefe had not cared enough about anyone to be even infinitesimally interested in hearing about any of their problems. Since the war, his paralysis, and the death of his parents, he had never had much more to lose, at least from an emotional standpoint, so the problems of other people seemed to him to be merely trifling and silly. Any development of empathy for others beyond which he had possessed as a child had been completely arrested. It was in fact quite possible that his capacities in that regard had suffered erosion over the years. He could not be sure; his memory was not dependable enough in such matters. But one thing was certain, his empathic abilities were much like his conscience; neither had gotten a whole lot of exercise for a very long time. But for reasons he could not now fathom, the captain’s tale had put a distinct and heavy ache in the pit of his heart. The feeling wasn’t unfamiliar; it was feeling it on someone else’s behalf that was a new sensation. That must have been evident on his face because now she looked at him as if she were the one who should be ashamed. She looked away and fiddled with the sash of her robe, studied the floor for a few moments, and refilled her glass with emerdal. At last she settled back into the chair and spoke again.

“What about you?” she asked. “Is there anyone you care about, someone that we took you from?”

O’Keefe was momentarily stunned. His jaw fell agape at the thought of anyone asking such a foolish question before it dawned on him that she saw him as youthful and whole, not past middle aged and crippled.

“No,” he finally said. “I mean, I thought I was in love a couple of times as a kid, but after I was wounded I didn’t get out much or meet many people,”
and besides, nobody ever gave a good god-damn about me when I was stuck in that chair
, his mind screamed. “Things just never worked out.”

“I’m sorry,” the captain said, and O’Keefe believed she truly was.

He uncharacteristically spoke up, starting the conversation anew. He knew he should have let it go, but he suddenly experienced an overwhelming desire to know more about the fate of Kebler Nelsik. “What do you think could have happened,” he asked tentatively, “to the
Pathfinder
I mean.”

She glanced at him sharply, as if surprised or even upset by the question. Nevertheless, she was soon rambling on again, the emerdal evidently loosing a need for loquaciousness within her, much as it had for O’Keefe.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve been over it a thousand times and nothing makes any sense. There have been many occasions where malfunctions or human error have caused cartography ships to overshoot their assigned coordinates, and generally nothing happens. The crews wipe their brows, count their blessings, and go on about their work, albeit considerably more carefully. And there have also been more tragic consequences. Some few crews have gone off into uncharted space and had collisions so violent that all they left behind was some space dust and an energy signature. Others have hit smaller objects and left a swath of wreckage light years long. But the
Pathfinder
left no trace at all; at least none that was ever found, despite an extensive search.

“I suppose it is conceivable that there could have been some malfunction that drove them so far out into uncharted space that any evidence of their fate was beyond the search parameters, but it hardly seems likely, or even possible for that matter.

“Or, they may have, for reasons unknown, gone off on another vector after they went sub-light at the wrong coordinates and met their fate in an area that there was no cause to search. But that doesn’t make any sense. There would have been no reason for them to do that when they could have merely retraced their path, finding their way to safety through the same space they had just traversed.

“They may have had deep drive problems or other damage so severe that they had to set the ship down somewhere for repairs that ultimately could not be made, and they’re out there, stranded on another world, waiting for rescue. But they would have sent a drone, all of their drones by this time, to tell us where they are.

“That is what is so mysterious about their disappearance. Any accident cataclysmic enough to destroy the ship would have left evidence behind so substantial that it could not have been missed. A
Trailblazer
class cartography vessel is not by any stretch of the imagination a large ship, but they still have an extensive engineering plant and a deep drive. Even if the vessel had been completely vaporized, the explosion of a starship of any size is a cosmic event on a scale that should be readily detectable with no search at all. So there you have it. It is hard to envision a scenario where the ship was either destroyed far enough away to remain undetected, or one where it was disabled in a way that both kept it from returning home and rendered it unable to send for aid.

“I know from a rational standpoint that I’m being foolish, but the only possibility that I can’t rule out is a mutiny. That has never happened in the Corps, so on the surface it seems out of the question. It could be just my mind’s refusal to accept the loss of Kebler, I don’t know. Maybe I’m searching in vain for some sequence of events that would have the end result of allowing him to survive, but even when I try to look at it as objectively as possible I can’t bring myself to think so. I’ve done some research on the subject. With the exception of those ships lost in areas that the Vazileks have penetrated, no government owned ship, or for that matter any starship, has been lost without a trace or a distress signal for at least five thousand years. Such a circumstance may never have occurred, but five millennia was as far back as I looked.

“So I can’t help but think that maybe he is still out there. I think the reason no one has been able to uncover any trace of them is because the mutineers who took the ship do not want to be found. I think some small group of people on board took the
Pathfinder
and hijacked it for their own purposes. And maybe, just maybe, the crew is not dead but is being held captive somewhere. I know that it is a thin hope, but mutiny, flight, and deliberate evasion is the only concatenation of assumptions I can come up with that fits the facts, or I guess I should say the lack of them. That ship wasn’t lost; someone stole it. That’s why I volunteered and took a commission in the police force. If criminals have that ship, I want to be in on finding them.” She leaned farther back in her chair and looked unseeing out into the forest, biting her lower lip.

O’Keefe did not have the heart to state the obvious. If there had been mutineers aboard the
Pathfinder
, and if they had wanted to disappear and have no one ever learn of what they had done, the first thing on their agenda would have been to kill any witnesses. So he kept his thoughts to himself and was cautiously vague when he spoke again.

“Stranger things have happened,” he said, and it was not a lie. In any disaster, there almost always seemed to be someone who, against all odds, somehow survived. O’Keefe was too cynical to believe that was the case in this instance, but still it wasn’t a lie. That wasn’t much to credit himself with, but it made him feel a bit better about his morbid curiosity.