She looked out over the men and scowled. “I can kill you worthless, sniveling piles of excrement all day long if that’s what you want. We have plenty of time. However, if death is not your desire, one of you had better learn to do as I say.” The pitch and decibel level of her voice again increased with each word until she was red faced and screaming virulently. “Bring me number forty!”
Forty was apparently resigned to his fate and meant to sacrifice himself for the good of the others. He marched to the foot of the stairs without having to be prompted, the three lackeys merely following lamely behind him as he ascended. He knelt in the blood and dutifully removed his clothing with alacrity when the order came. When the bloody knife fell at his feet, he picked it up and grabbed his genitalia in one hand while with the other he severed them from his body with one sickening, upward slash. Unable to suppress a scream of agony, Forty sunk to the floor with his hands pressed tightly between his legs as he tried desperately to stanch the flow of his blood.
Elorak stood over him in triumph, savoring her moment of ultimate power. Then she bent down for the knife, wiped its blade and her gloves on Forty’s discarded tee-shirt, and rose, gesturing to her three lackeys. “Take him to the infirmary,” she said, her tone revealing only contempt. “Find his privates and take them, too. Have him sewn back together.” She turned and approached the front of the stage, speaking soothingly as several other men from her retinue of bootlickers climbed the stairs to help carry Forty away. “There, do you see. The man who obeyed my orders experienced only some small amount of pain. He will almost certainly be unable to procreate, but your future holds no possibilities in that area regardless of the circumstances. And in a short time Number Forty will be more or less none the worse for wear, no different than you who still stand before me. Whereas the two who did not obey have succeeded only in making an abominable mess for my favorites to cleanse from this chamber. So you see I am not so cruel as long as you do as I command. Remember this well. Obedience is life, defiance is death. That is all you need to know here. Now, there will be one more repetition to insure that you understand. Show me how you will behave at my approach.”
Her audience fell to their knees as one and touched their foreheads to the ground. “Much better,” Elorak cooed. “Now for your next lesson. You will never speak to me or address me in any manner unless I command it of you. You will be silent in my presence. But should you ever have the good fortune to be questioned by me, you will address me as ‘Your worship.’ If you should fail to adhere to this rule the penalty is the same as that merited by most any other infraction. That would be death, and depending on my mood, probably not so swift a death as you have witnessed here today. Punishment in the arena can be a very long and drawn out affair, as you will all learn soon enough, so I will not bore you with the details. Now I trust that all of you will remember well what you have learned here today. My guards will now escort you to your new living quarters. That will be all.” She turned and without further ado marched solemnly off the stage and out of sight.
As soon as she turned to leave, the diesels of the lizards all came to life nearly simultaneously, as if on cue in a well-choreographed drama of death. O’Keefe had been gripped too tightly by the gruesome scenes he had just witnessed to notice, but the air in the chamber had somehow been purified during Elorak’s murderous exposition. But now that the lizard’s engines were all rumbling again, the air became noxious in only moments. O’Keefe’s eyes watered as he began to wheeze and cough anew.
He looked to his two companions. Steenini appeared well enough, coughing slightly but otherwise standing stoically at O’Keefe’s side. But to Bart’s right Lindy swayed like a tower on a moving fault line. His eyes were starting to glaze over and roll back in his head. O’Keefe could see that in a moment he would faint away. He reached past Steenini and pulled Lindy to him where he held him up with his left arm. With his right hand he patted Lindy’s cheeks, ever more forcefully, until the pilot’s eyes began to show some alertness and focus.
“Yo, Willet,” he said. “Hang in there, all right? All right!” Lindy nodded, took a deep breath, and reached up to clasp O’Keefe’s right hand. O’Keefe briefly returned his grip before releasing him and finding that the man could now stand on his own.
Meanwhile, the surrounding lizard guards had closed in around the prisoners, pushing them into a jostling mass at the center of the cavern. O’Keefe found himself unable to move more than a few inches in any direction. He watched as one of the guards broke ranks and turned to one side, where two of Elorak’s lackeys pulled a long length of thick cable from the spool of its winch, laying it out across the floor in front of the beast. As soon as the men scampered out of the way it clanked forward until the cable was stretched out behind it and another of Elorak’s favorites was able to push it into a collapsible eyehook that protruded from beneath the rear of the guard’s armored chassis. All of Elorak’s toadies then gathered round the right tread of the lizard where one of their number opened a steel tool box that was welded to the fender and began to pass out handcuffs that he retrieved from within. Upon receiving a pair, each lackey squeezed between the guards surrounding the prisoners and culled a man from the crowd, who they then fettered behind the lone, outlying lizard with one ring of the cuffs around a wrist and the other locked through small hoops of steel that had been built into the cable at regular intervals. The men were attached one by the right wrist and the next by the left.
When the cable had no more open rings to cuff through, the reptile roared off toward the wall of the chamber, while another deserted the perimeter to follow behind, just on the heels of the men in tow. A section of the wall opened outward at the guard’s approach, and the procession rumbled off into a passageway at a speed that forced the prisoners to trot.
Another guard left the circle surrounding the men and had the cable from its winch locked in place just at the first had. More men were taken from the crowd, cuffed, and then dragged away.
As the process of removing the prisoners from the auditorium continued the lizard guards indulged in much whip cracking, guttural orders, and puerile insults. Replacement reptiles arrived or perhaps returned to the cavern in a random fashion, but there were always more than enough of them to keep the ring of steel surrounding the prisoners intact. Any audible comments from the men were answered instantly by the sting of a lash while several who were unfortunate enough to raise the ire of one of the beasts were speared and killed. O’Keefe could see no method to the beasts’ madness. The murdered men had not appeared to be behaving differently than any other prisoner. Apparently the lizards simply enjoyed killing every so often, as each death brought a chorus of basso guffaws from deep in their throats.
Shortly O’Keefe, Steenini, and Lindy were among a group cut from the crush of bodies. The unspeaking lackeys cuffed each of them behind a waiting guard as it idled outside the ring of its comrades. O’Keefe stood by, standing slightly bent over with his shoulders slumped, trying hard to hide his eight inch height advantage over the tallest of the Akadeans. But there was no way to cover his pale complexion. He looked nothing like the other prisoners. He expected to be singled out at any moment by a guard or one of the lackeys. But they paid no heed to his aberrant features, as he simply stood unmolested while more and more men were manacled to the cable that now hung from his left wrist. Perhaps they are used to strangers, he mused. After all, as he had learned for the UP network, they enslaved every being that they came across. There was no telling how many strange species populated their prisons. Shortly, a last man was attached at the butt end of the line, and the lizard roared off, pulling the cable taut and quickly settling the men into a jog.
They entered a passageway. It was a dimly lit tunnel of the same rough cut rock that seemed to make up the entire complex. It was easily wide enough for two of the guards to pass each other in opposite directions, but when that did indeed happen, invariably one or both of the guards would scrape the wall or strike a glancing blow
against the other, adding new blemishes to their already marred hulls. The diesel fumes, which had been acrid in the auditorium, were stifling in the tunnel. The lizard’s exhaust blew from beneath its undercarriage, so the men were forced to run through a cloud of it continuously. There was much violent hacking and expectorated sputum as they struggled to keep their breath in the midst of the poisoned air. Steenini fell once and was dragged by his arm for a short distance before he could once again get to his feet and resume trotting. O’Keefe could see that blood ran from both his knees down the front of his legs, but he, being chained out of reach, had been powerless to do anything to help.
The tunnel seemed to stretch into eternity. Occasionally the towing guard thundered through intersections with other passageways, but the crossings never caused the pace to slacken. O’Keefe was able to keep up despite the ache in his chest that spiked when he gasped for air; the months of endless exercise on Vigilant were now paying dividends that he could never have envisioned at the time. It was clear that others were failing, however, as the rigors of the passage to Ashawzut began to exact their toll. Many of the men were being pulled along by the cable, their bound arm outstretched rigidly before them and their legs with barely the strength to keep them from falling. Trails of spittle hung from the corners of their mouths. From time to time little strings of it were shaken away by the violent shocks sent through their bodies as their boot clad feet pounded down the stone floor of the corridors.
Just when O’Keefe felt that the men around him would begin to collapse and be dragged, the towing guard slowed and ground to a halt just past an arched and doorless opening in the side of the passageway. A number—121—was graven deeply into the rock beside the breach. The men’s shackles all popped open simultaneously and the cable, handcuffs and all, was reeled back onto the lizard’s winch. It then spun around on its treads and faced the men. “Inside,” it barked. “And stay there. If caught outside quarters, punishment is sure.”
“Let me hazard a guess,” O’Keefe muttered weakly, “that the penalty for that would be death.”
“Silence!” bellowed the reptile that had been bringing up the rear. O’Keefe immediately dodged to his left, knowing the whip would follow the word. It did, cracking beside his right shoulder as he moved. Before the creature could draw back for another strike O’Keefe darted through the opening in the wall and out of reach. The guard roared in anger and pushed its way forward until the front of its hull was flush against both sides of the doorway. It stuck its long necked head and arms into the room only to find O’Keefe well out of reach, even of the whip. The enraged lizard flailed its weapon at him several times anyway before it realized the futility of its actions, yet still its tracks scraped uselessly against the stone floor outside as it strained to move forward. But the wall between the room and the passageway was solid rock and too thick for even a tracked vehicle to break through. Finally the lividly confounded creature sought to reach behind its neck for a spear but found that action too to be thwarted by the relative smallness of the doorway. At length it bared its teeth at O’Keefe and roared fearsomely, “I not forget you, human,” before withdrawing and finally allowing the other men to enter.
Many, including Steenini, fell directly to the floor, gasping for breath. Lindy knelt at his side as O’Keefe approached. “Is he going to be okay?” the Earther panted, still shaken by the violent reaction of the lizard guard to his comment.
“I think so,” Lindy replied without looking away from Steenini. “At least in the short term. But he has been tortured to the point where his body can’t take much more of this. If what we have already been through is any indication of the daily fare here, this place will kill him in due time.”
“I think that is the general idea, Willet,” rasped Steenini, slowly opening his eyes. “As I have confided in Hill here, the Vazileks have a complaint with me. Their goal is to break me or kill me trying.”
“Yeah, well they’re not going to be successful,” O’Keefe said confidently as he knelt next to Lindy. He put an arm under Steenini’s shoulder blades and the other beneath the back of his knees and lifted the man into his arms, standing as he did so. The little man’s weight should have been easy for O’Keefe to bear, but under the circumstances he could barely hold him aloft. The broken Akadean wrapped his own arms around O’Keefe’s neck, trying to help out.
“Let’s find you a bunk, Bart,” O’Keefe said between ragged breaths. “And then the three of us are going to start figuring out how to get out of here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:
Ashawzut
As O’Keefe stood, still holding Steenini in his arms, he for the first time took a good look around their new home. Like every other part of their prison, it was large, gray, and hollowed out of solid rock. The front third of the barracks was an open area with the entry in one corner. In the other corner was a large tub, a latrine of sorts, covered by a rough wooden seat; and a barrel with a crude tap at its base, sitting on a four-legged stand. A dirty cup, held by a chain, hung from the side of the barrel. It was clear that this was to be their source of drinking water. O’Keefe was afraid to guess of what quality that water would be. The rest of the excavation was covered by rows of bunks, the spaces between them only wide enough for two men to squeeze past each other shoulder to shoulder. The rows projected perpendicularly out from the rear wall, each one being eight bunks long and four bunks high, and there were about two dozen rows. The beds were fitted with thin, coarsely covered mattresses, all of which were presently unoccupied, save for some gray bundles of clothing lying atop them here and there.
Still trying to catch the breath robbed from him by the long run from the auditorium, O’Keefe carried Steenini to the row of bunks against the wall farthest from the entrance. He wanted to get as far as possible from the crowd they had arrived with, most of whom still milled about in the open area near the door. He laid the man gently on the lowest bed at the head of that row. The touch of the mattress against the back of his hands was enough to tell him that the stuffing inside was little softer than the wood beneath. As he took a seat on the bunk opposite the one where he had placed Steenini, Lindy appeared with a pair of his new gray socks, dripping with water from the barrel up front. He knelt beside Steenini, wiping his face, and then leaving the socks draped over his forehead as a cold compress. The pilot then took a seat beside O’Keefe, still breathing heavily himself but saying nothing.
Steenini groaned, and O’Keefe reached out to gently grasp his arm. “You going to be okay, buddy?” he asked.
“I’ll be right as rain in just a little while, mate. Don’t you worry,” came the pained reply.
“Can you tell us more about this place?” O’Keefe asked. “Are you up to it?”
“Oh, for the love of Stirga, I’m not dying. I’m just a little tuckered out, that’s all. What do you want to know?”
“I want to know how we can get the fuck out of here. I mean, this is getting to the point where it is a bit beyond the pale. I’ve been a prisoner ever since I woke up on one of your ships,” he paused to glare momentarily at Lindy, “and the accommodations I’ve been afforded keep taking turns for the worse. I mean, look at this place. I’m telling you, I’m ready to start killing somebody, starting with that crazy bitch Elorak. But before we get to her, tell us about those lizards. What’s the story with them? They appear to be terribly inefficient guards. They seem nearly moronic and criminally insane to boot. Why don’t the Vazileks just use robots, like on the transport?”
Steenini started a laugh that, as usual for him, turned into a coughing fit. When it at length subsided he began to speak. “We’re not important enough to merit machines,” he answered, still chuckling ironically. “The Vazileks know we are quite subdued. Putting a contingent of assault bots in here as guards, along with their maintenance facilities, would be a terrific misallocation of assets. The lizards, as you call them, don’t require any programming or upkeep. They are just smart enough to do as they are told, and
the machine half of them is simple enough that they are able to maintain themselves under the tutelage of the colony network. In addition, they have a fanatic loyalty, born of desperation, to Mada Elorak. They have no hearts, literally. The diesels pump their blood. Without fuel, they die; and Elorak controls the flow of fuel, so they will fight to the death to protect her.”
O’Keefe broke in, ideas germinating in his mind like desert flowers after a long overdue rain. “Then we must gain control of the fuel. Then they will be loyal to us, and we win hands down. We’ll own this place.”
“Not so fast,” Steenini protested. “She controls the flow of fuel through the colony network, which is programmed to recognize only her. The drives that contain the core programming, if they are anything at all like every other Vazilek installation that I have knowledge of, are read and write protected. Only Elorak has the codes to override that protection. It is not like we could simply input a request to stop the flow of diesel fuel.
“And we will have no tools here save picks, hammers, and shovels, hardly the means to break into the fuel depot, even if we were able to determine its location. We also haven’t the technology to fool the network into thinking that one of us is Elorak, and even the chance to try that would necessitate somehow gaining access to an interface. In the unlikely event that we were able to overcome those two obstacles, I would assume that anything critical, like access to the fuel rationing subsystems for example, would be password protected beyond the override codes. Without processing power of our own, we could easily spend the rest of our lives trying to hack into those subsystems manually, and that’s assuming that there is no failsafe. The Vazileks are very clever. The system may be programmed to shut down or even format every drive on the planet if it in any way becomes apparent that a non-authorized entity is attempting to access the system. No, she—and only she—controls the ration of fuel for the beasties. There is nothing we can do about that. If you mean to defeat her, you must defeat her guards as well.”
The Empty Warrior Page 44
