The Empty Warrior (5 page)

The men and women sent to Sol Three had supposedly been an advance team meant to carve out the beginnings of the first city on the new world while the final stages of the planet’s remodeling were under way. But the settlement had never been meant to be an entity capable of self-sustainment, a colony that could survive shorn of support from the home world. Everyone involved had been well aware of that, from the upper echelons of the Colonial Authority down to the youngest settler. And yet here they were, stranded on a malignant globe.

And if all that were not enough, there were the indigenous proto-humanoids, bipeds who walked nearly as upright as the colonists did, but were otherwise hirsute, brawny creatures with sloping foreheads and large, heavy brow ridges. They seemed to possess some rudimentary intelligence, but if they had a language it remained indecipherable to the colonists. The brutish beings traveled in small bands and were for the most part still fearful of the Akadeans, giving their enclave a wide berth. But despite their avoidance of the settlement proper, their often empty stomachs did at times overcome their natural reticence and drove them to raid the colony’s fields.

Agriculture was beyond the scope of their intellect, and the readily available nourishment that grew on the farms of the colony had over time become a greater and greater temptation to the simple hunter gatherers. And over the years, as their initial trepidity of the interlopers from the skies had waned, their depredations had become almost commonplace, sometimes dangerous, and on occasion led to lethal confrontations between themselves and those colonists forced to help the overworked Sentinels drive them away. Some few of the colonists and many more of the stocky humanoids were killed each year in these clashes.

The Akadean population had been further decimated by other, less feral means as well; as some had given up on the community altogether, abandoning it to go in search of more hospitable climes. Several times each year, a group as large as a dozen or as few as two would slip away, usually in the dead of night, never to be seen again. With each desertion, the colony became a little weaker and little more vulnerable.

There was desperation behind each of the departures. Every man and woman in the village knew full well of the centuries the planet had been meticulously groomed for colonization. Even before they had embarked on the ships that brought them here; years of study had deemed their present location to be the most beneficent on the planet for both prosperity and expansion. Dreams of randomly stumbling into a less threatening and more bountiful locale were almost certainly nothing save delusory hopes.
But desperate minds never allow the facts to interfere with their views,
the old man thought, so people continued to drift away.

Clumsily, he maneuvered his chair back from the table and rose to his full height, frowning as he did so at the creaking sounds that came from his knees. The fabric that covered his head fell down over his back as he stood, revealing a shock of shoulder length white hair, which thinned to nonexistence across the crown of his pate. He rearranged the makeshift hood so that once again only his weatherbeaten face was left bare to the sun, and turned to shuffle away toward the hill where he had begun to spend more and more of his time. The whitish robes he wore trailed through the dust his sandal clad feet lifted in his wake.

“Where are you going?” He turned in the direction of the voice to see the slight figure of his wife standing in the doorway of their dilapidated home. Her hair was askance, locks of it loosed from the tie at the back of her neck, the graying strands falling about her sweat-stained cheeks. Standing with hands on her hips, her lined features looked as severe as the sound of her voice; while her clothing was as rough and native as the old man’s own.

“I need a break,” he said. “I don’t know if I can fix that one anymore.” He gestured to the assortment of parts strewn around the table that had at one time been a functioning Sentinel. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Well, don’t be too long,” she said, scolding him gently. “And be careful. I’d go with you but I have dinner on. And say a prayer for her from me while you’re up there.” He nodded, not thinking it unusual in the least that she would know exactly where he intended to go without him saying. He turned and trudged away between the empty houses.

We’ve both grown so feeble
, he thought, as he walked slowly through the village. He had never felt nor seen the effects of aging before he had come to this world. On Akadea, the magic of medical science kept people from showing their age, and when age outdistanced the reach of technology, a person simply exchanged a worn out body for a new one. It was a process that continued until one was either killed in some freak accident or the brain became too ancient to respond to treatment and lost function. So the old man had been unprepared for the aches and pains, for the loss of youth and vitality, that a life on Earth had come to mean. He had expected to be able to leave the colony for home when the time came for rejuvenation. But it was not to be. He was only in his third embodiment, less than three hundred years old, and slowly dying.

How could they maroon us like this
, he raged silently.
The bastards!
He walked along with his mind a seething tempest, until the tide of anger that had flooded his brain ebbed and reason returned. They had not been deserted or forgotten; that interpretation of events was clearly irrational. It simply could not be. Akadeans did not do such things. It was true that the band of colonists had come here to establish a secluded retreat for their now eccentric religion; to be free from the scorn of a society were so few still believed. But surely it was not possible that their brethren had turned their backs on them for that reason alone. No, that was not what had happened. Something had gone wrong; something had gone terribly wrong.

When the supply ships had ceased their deliveries and the colony’s stores fell to critical levels, drones had been systematically dispatched back to the home world, one every six months, until there were none left to be sent. Each carried messages detailing the colony’s plight. All of them could not have malfunctioned; some of them must have reached Akadea. Perhaps the beacon frequency had been changed and the Colonial Authority had neglected to inform them. But there was no evidence that Colonial Authority ships still arrived anywhere on or around Sol Three. The authority could have been disbanded by now for all the old man knew. But whatever else had happened it was clear that the reengineering of the planet had ceased, and apparently was not to be resumed. And it made no difference anyway. Even if the bureaucracy of the authority still functioned back home and had indeed changed the frequency, drones were programmed to begin broadcasting across the spectrum if they were not retrieved after a few weeks. After fifty years certainly one of them would have been found by someone. So why had there never been a reply? The old man had gone over every possibility he could imagine a thousand times, and had yet to come up with a satisfactory answer.
Why bother
, he asked himself.
Accept it; don’t dwell on the past
. No freighter filled with desperately needed supplies was going to miraculously appear in orbit high above, and there was no way for them to reach out on their own, as the colony was millenniums away from having the means to build starships. It was merely a fact of life that they were stuck here. The colonists would have to do the best they could on their own.

He reached the base of the hillside and started up the well worn path. It was not a steep climb, and the path wound from side to side as it traversed the ascent, making the trek even less arduous. Nevertheless the old man stopped halfway up for a rest, his heart beating ominously from exertion. He turned to sit on a small boulder next to the track, a spot grown familiar to him over time. He had paused here often on his slogs up to the cemetery.

From this vantage point he could see the whole of the settlement stretched out below him. It was not an encouraging vista. Although impervious to corrosion or rot, all the plastiform buildings showed, even at this distance, signs of aging and deterioration. They sat arranged in their immaculately laid out pattern, bleaching in the sun and cracking from the heat. The outlying domiciles were vacant now, their desuetude confirmed by the tall grass that surrounded them and the encroaching vegetation that would one day overwhelm them. The village seemed dead, a few thin columns of smoke rising from afternoon cook fires the only proof that it was inhabited at all. Most of the settlers were away at this time of day, hard at work either on protection or provisioning.

The old man could see, barely, the women and the young amidst the plantings, tending to the crops alongside the remaining Grangers. At the edges of the fields the men; those who were not out hunting, patrolled; armed only with spears and crude bows. The power packs for the few weapons they had brought with them from Akadea had been exhausted years ago.

The last of the remaining Sentinels moved restlessly along their assigned paths three meters above the crops, but their small numbers were of little use. Marauding birds bolted skyward at their approach, squawking loudly; they had long since been imbued with a fear of the electric sting the machines imparted. But experience had also taught them the threat radius of the robots, and they quickly settled back to earth to continue their plundering once the danger had passed. It was the old man’s opinion that the birds benefited more from the crops than did the colonists.

Slowly becoming more and more morose as he looked out over the small demesne of the settlement and the evidence of its decline, he pushed himself up off the rock and forced his haggard legs into motion, plodding deliberately up the path toward his objective. He did not look back at the village for the remainder of the climb. Instead he kept his eyes glued to the narrow groove of dry, denuded earth; formed by nothing more than the grating pressure of thousands of footfalls; that led to the summit. At last he reached the hilltop and made his way across the relatively flat expanse toward his goal, a certain gravesite. His feet knew the way to the marker. He shuffled bleakly past stones denoting the more recent deaths, making his way to the back of the necropolis and his daughter’s plot. When he reached it he halted and stood quietly, reverently, as he tried to remember only the good things about her life but could not.

“Oh, Evenia,” he said softly, his eyes closed and head shaking slowly, volitionlessly, from side to side. After a time a single word escaped his lips. “Why?” The question was posed to the air and the universe. It was a question he never ceased to ask from this spot, yet he had never expected an answer.

She had been so young, not even twenty-five years of age when she had been taken, barely on the verge of her first marriage. Her intended had been with the old man when they found her, or what was left of her. The big cat had not left much. The old man had been a younger man then, but even so all he could do was fall into a grief stricken malaise. The son in-law to be took it not nearly so well. He had howled in agony, an abruptly broken and angry man, and had rushed back to the village to gather up all the weapons that still functioned and recruit a posse to help him exact revenge. It was a mission they accomplished in less than two days. When the group marched back into the settlement it was with the cat’s hide, a pelt the young man incorporated into his wardrobe from that day forward.

He was gone now; he had been for years. He had disappeared with one of the small bands that left seeking better fortune elsewhere.
Not that it mattered,
the old man thought. The fiancé had changed from a fine young man into a hostile, almost unrecognizable person. A tangible sense of relief had spread over the village as word of his departure had made the rounds. Few had been sorry to find him gone.

But he was hardly the only one to have been altered by the nature of the world upon which they had been reefed. Many had taken different paths to a similar madness, and it seemed that nearly everyone was not as sane as when they had arrived.

O Creator of all
, the old man wailed in his mind,
what will become of us in this place?
He fell to his knees and collapsed into an upright fetal ball next to his daughter’s grave, softly beseeching his God not for rescue, but only for the opportunity to be reunited with his offspring upon his death, an event he strongly suspected would soon be in the offing. The promise to his wife was also not forgotten as he uttered a small prayer on her behalf. Afterward he sat by the gravesite staring into the empty sky until the sun was low, the shadows were long, and he knew it was past time to go.

At last he rose and walked away. As he made his way back along the trail to the village, foreboding wrapped around him like cerements. In the last few hours he had finally fully accepted what should have been clear to him for decades. All of his and his neighbors’ efforts were in vain. The colony would never prosper, or even survive. What few people remained when the settlement at long last collapsed would eventually be dispersed into various groups and clans, left to their own devices to attempt to scratch survival out of this harsh and unforgiving world.

His Evenia may have been one of the lucky ones, as he was certain degeneration was all that awaited the survivors. Even now, the children in the settlement were maturing into much coarser and less erudite specimens of adolescence than their parents had ever been. And that was a trend that would continue. Despite the emphasis among the elders on leaving behind a written tableau of their expertise and experience, no one could record everything residing in their skulls. Only a fraction of what they knew would be passed on to the young.