As that thought flew across his neurons, the genesis of an idea formed in Lindy’s brain. He raised his head to look at Steenini. “We’re in the wrong place,” he said deliberately. “We need to be on those freighters. They have their own power source; they’re self-contained. Damn it all, they might even be armed. I mean, they’re Vazilek aren’t they? We need to get down to the hangar!”
Steenini was already out of his chair, trotting from the room. Lindy followed close behind. The two of them practically ran over Beccassit as they came storming into the living area. “Where’s the dog!” Lindy demanded.
“He is in the infirmary,” replied Beccassit, as the two men rushed by him in that direction. Lindy heard the doctor’s voice continue behind him. “It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. The dog won’t leave his side; the beast just sits there with his head lying on the table next to Hill’s. I’d rather he not be in there at all but… Hey, what is going on anyway?”
“We need to get to the ships,” Lindy shouted back to him. Both he and Steenini fairly sprinted into the infirmary, nearly colliding with the bulk of Regulus as they did so. Within the confining walls of the small room, the dog looked every bit as prodigious as it had in the elevator. Lindy, ignoring his fear, stepped carefully around the animal until he could look into the dog’s eyes.
He began to speak excitedly. “We need your help again,” he said. “We must get past your friends and gain entry to the ships in the dock. We’ll all die here if we don’t find a way out of this place in a very short time. Do you understand me?”
In reply Regulus stood and gently pushed his way past the humans. The dog loped to the elevator door and stood there waiting until the two men jogged up beside him and Lindy pressed the recall button. The doors opened immediately, and the three practically fought each other to gain entry. Beccassit crossed the room and squeezed in after them, just before the doors slid shut. “What about Hill?” Steenini asked, an implication of negligence in his tone.
Beccassit smiled, ignoring the slight. “There is nothing more I can do for him, and nothing more needs to be done for him. He won’t wake up for hours, and even if he does come to before my return, I hardly think our aberrant friend will be too terribly traumatized by finding himself alone. After all, the man just killed an armored reptile twenty feet tall with no help from any of us. I think he will be fine. Just push the button.”
The doctor’s logic, as usual, was unassailable, and Steenini yielded with a shrug and did as he was told, pushing the button that sent the elevator plunging into the depths of Ashawzut. Shortly, they were back in the warren of corridors that only the dogs seemed able to precisely navigate, passing large and small groups of men milling about without purpose. The group moved quickly, following Regulus, while along the way Steenini explained their dilemma to the doctor. When they reached the hangar, Regulus gave a knowing look to the two dogs at the entry and they moved aside to let the group pass.
The floor was empty of men and all three of the ships appeared not to have been tampered with. Apparently the dogs had anticipated the need to secure the vessels just as they had with Elorak’s quarters and Beccassit’s dispensary. They had purposely kept everyone out. Lindy was becoming more impressed with their acumen at every turn. He pointed at one of the pair of larger freighters. “Let’s try that one,” he said, and the three men started off toward the ship, leaving Regulus behind with his two packmates.
As the men walked briskly across the huge expanse of the hangar, Lindy questioned Steenini. “Are you sure you can get us into this thing?”
“Absolutely,” came the strained but confident reply. “These aren’t fighting ships. They’re freighters. They’re automated. By their very nature they have to be accessible to an ever changing assemblage of people, robots, and machine creatures all along their supply routes. It’s much cheaper for the Vazileks to use on site security than to outfit each of their ships with protection compatible with everyone that needs access to them. Now that there are no guards to keep us from getting close to them it’s merely a matter of pressing the right buttons.” Lindy was still dubious, but Steenini laughed, or at least attempted to, for as usual when he was exerting himself his mirth turned into a short series of coughs. “Don’t worry, Willet, just watch me work,” he averred, once he regained his breath.
They crossed under the shadow cast by the fat cylinder that comprised the hull of the ship as Steenini led the way to the nearest pair of support struts, one of six that kept the freighter’s bulk nearly parallel to the hangar floor, its nose only slightly higher than its tail. There was a control panel embedded into the strut at about chest height. Steenini pulled open the transparent cover, reached into it to touch the pressure sensitive display, and immediately a square section of the great vessel detached itself from the hull, pivoting down from its lower edge at a spot just where the support strut joined the hull of the ship. Once it was parallel to the ground it smoothly descended to the floor, moving along a track attached to the side of the landing strut. When it stopped a few inches above the stone, a gate in the railing that surrounded the platform swung open to admit the men.
There was another panel aboard the lift, attached to the railing, that looked identical to the one Steenini had located in the support strut. As soon as the gate was closed and latched behind them, Steenini again punched in a command and the platform rose back up to the opening in the side of the freighter. There, the railing parted on the side of the platform adjacent to the ship, giving the group access to its interior. They stepped into an airlock, where Steenini yet again engaged a panel that caused an inner hatch to move aside. Moving forward, they entered a claustrophobic, darkened corridor, floored with steel grating and constricted by numerous conduits and piping running down and across the width of the overhead and at points along the sides of the walls as well.
Steenini turned to a flat-panel display next to the egress from the airlock and spoke to it. “Cammatch,” he said. A green arrow, pointing left, immediately began to flash on the display. “Let’s go,” he said.
“What is cammatch?” asked Lindy.
“It’s the Vazilek word for the bridge,” Steenini answered over his shoulder, already walking away in the direction the arrow pointed.
“You understand their language?” Lindy asked as he hurried to catch Steenini, Beccassit directly behind him.
“Well, of course I do; I worked for them. You didn’t expect them to demean themselves by learning our language, did you? Even Elorak had a language chip I’m sure, and you know it must have plagued her every moment that she had to use it. But in any case, it’s not too awfully difficult to learn, as both Akadean and the Vazilek tongue appear to spring from the same root.” The group came to an open door with a green circle flashing above it. They entered, and the door closed behind them, followed by the sensation of horizontal movement.
“What do you mean they spring from the same root?” Lindy asked warily, finding the notion to be suspicious, at best.
“He means we are related,” interjected the doctor. “Did you never look at Elorak? She may have been a bit thin, and a bit pale, but she was obviously human. Somehow we share the same ancestry. The Vazileks are probably some heretofore undiscovered remnant of humanity left over from before the Cataclysm.” He spoke with a surety that was persuasive to Lindy, but the pilot was still not ready to wholly accept the idea.
“Well, she certainly did not act as if she were in any way related to us or the Rock.” Lindy stated disconsolately. “And if they are somehow related to Old Akadea and the seed of humanity,” he added, “where did they come from? We have found every colony ever listed in any of the records, or at least found evidence of the colony’s prior existence. How could we have missed the Vazileks? Isn’t it more likely that whoever they are they simply co-opted some humans they were able to capture?” Lindy’s facts were correct, but it wasn’t a very convincing denial, even to himself. There were a lot of things that had been lost and had r
emained lost after the Cataclysm. And if the Vazilek language was related to Akadean, they would almost have to be some kind of offshoot of Akadean civilization.
“I have a theory about that,” Beccassit said. “I believe the Vazileks sprang up from the remnants of the old fleet. Not every ship could have been engulfed in the conflagration and the aftermath. And precious few of the survivors ever showed up at colony ports, that we know as a matter of record. Some of the fleet must have survived and sailed off into uncharted space. They lived half their lives in the void as it was. With the destruction of the home world, I would bet they became nomads, never settling anywhere. But resourceful as they were, even the ancients could not build ships that were completely self-sufficient; all of them would have needed supplies and repairs at some point. Eventually it must have become much easier for them to simply take what they needed rather than attempting to pay or bargain for it. So they turned. They lost their respect for the lives of others. Then after millennia, when they happened to chance back upon others of their own species, it was only a small step for them to become aberrants, to begin preying on their own kind. I believe they are an echo from our own past, come back to haunt us.”
Lindy started to retort with another halfhearted denial but was kept from it by the door to the lift sliding aside. The three men stepped out into a cramped but deserted control room. Steenini immediately took a seat at the nearest console and started banging out commands on the control panel before him. Lindy, along with the doctor, watched over his shoulder but the screens, as before, shifted with such rapidity that neither could fully grasp what Steenini was up to. At length the man uttered a curse before banging his fist on a panel. “None of them are armed,” he said simply. “The only things these turkeys can blow up are themselves.”
Beccassit sighed, looking downcast, but Lindy’s mind, the mind of a pilot, was already exploring multiple possibilities. “What kind of selfdestruct mechanisms are we talking about here?” he asked.
“Thermonuclear weapons built into the engineering sections. They light off, then the reactors and the engines go, and then there isn’t much more than dust left for any attacker to salvage. Why?” Steenini, for all his brilliance, wasn’t yet thinking along the same lines as Lindy.
The pilot pressed his reasoning forward. “What would happen if we channeled all the power of the two big ships into their shields and then blew up the little one under the entrance to the hangar? Would the shields collapse before the door blew outward?”
Steenini looked at Lindy with a newfound respect. “Well, damn, mate,” he said softly, intrigued by the possibility. “I don’t know. But I will in few minutes.” Before the last word was completely uttered his fingers were already racing across the controls before him, pulling up megatonnage, blast coefficients, and shield generator outputs. Lindy again lost track quickly and simply waited patiently for Steenini to finish his calculations. The man continued to pull up screen after screen of computations. He powered up the com gear in the freighter and patched its electronic brain into both of the other ships and the colony network. After nearly a quarter hour of feverish activity, Steenini’s fingers quieted and the screen before him froze, a schematic of the huge hangar entry hatch displayed there.
“Damn,” he muttered again, more to himself than to the two other men present. “I can’t tell for sure. It’s too close a thing. The designs are all here, but there are no metallurgic records from the construction and no way of knowing the exact thickness of the surrounding rock, or its exact geologic structure. If the composition of the metal in the doors is as strong as it is in most Akadean usages, and the ceiling is too thick, we’ll all be burned to cinders. But if the ceiling is thin enough around the hatch, or if the structure itself is built as shoddily as everything else around here, it should blow outward before the ships incur any appreciable damage. We could test for all the missing variables of course, but there’s no time. We’d all be dead before we could finish.” He stood up to look Lindy and then the doctor in the eye. “I say try it. I can’t imagine the Vazileks doing less of a slipshod job on those doors than on any other part of the colony. They don’t appear to value our lives at all, and all the ships that come in here are unmanned. What do they care if the access doors are not of the best construction?” He paused. “Plus, I can’t think of any other way to get out of here alive, so there’s not much to lose.”
“What about the hangar machinery,” Lindy asked. We’ll never get all the people and provisions aboard without completing the unloading of these two big ones, and we’ll have to have the winches and cranes to get that done. Can you make any of that stuff work?”
“I won’t need to,” Steenini assured him. “Everything that is free standing still operates perfectly. It’s only the built-ins that are damaged; the hatches, the power plants, the ventilation system, that sort of thing. Along with the bots, of course.”
“What about the colony batteries?” Lindy asked. “Will the power last?”
“Willet, as I said previously, these are freighters,” intoned Steenini, smiling as he explained. “They’re built to interface with any and all Vazilek lading equipment. All we have to do is fire up the engineering plants and then patch the ships’ power into the machinery. I can take care of that in just a few minutes.”
“Excellent,” Lindy said. He looked to the doctor for an opinion, but Beccassit just shrugged and turned up his hands. “Well, that’s the plan then. Doctor, why don’t you go get Hill? Find some men to put him aboard this ship and then start getting everybody informed and ready. The two of us can empty these two big bastards, but we will need lots of strong backs to get all the foodstuffs out of the storerooms and into the hangar before we can start to reload. And we’ve got to find places aboard for everything and everybody. And we have to do it quickly. If I were you I’d tell that big dog, Regulus, that we need Valessanna’s husband. According to Hill he commands a lot of respect in here, or at least has the ear of the largest organized group. Get him to help you. For that matter, get the dogs to help you. They’ve had a lot of practice moving everyone around. Just make sure everybody knows that they’re on our side now. We don’t need a riot breaking out.
“Meanwhile, once we’re unloaded here, Bartle and I will taxi the smaller ship down under the doors.” Lindy turned to Steenini and spoke directly to him. “I’m pretty sure I can pilot the thing if you can identify some of the controls for me. Then you can make whatever arrangements we need to remotely light off the self-destruct mechanism. After that we’ll need to turn both of these big ones around and put them side by side.” Beccassit’s eyes widened as Lindy spoke.
“Hey, I know it’s going to be tough to get both of them through the hatch at the same time, but if we want to live through this, we are going to have to have all the shields expanded enough to cover both of these ships when the third one goes, while at the same time having both of them ready to blast out of here. If we line them up single file not only would we attenuate the shielding, but the back one would get an unprotected face full of plasma exhaust when we leave. That’s not going to work.” He raised an eyebrow at Steenini. “That further means that you will have to slave the other big boy to this one, so I can fly them both at the same time. If this is going to work these ships are going to have to do exactly what we want them to do exactly when we want them to do it, and there’s no telling if we can find another pilot here who is good enough to accomplish that. And even if we find one, you would have to teach both of us the Vazilek control interfaces well enough for us to operate synchronously. There’s no time for all that.”
Steenini laughed. “Mate,” he began, “don’t worry about me. I can take care of everything you just said all by myself and in less than an hour or two. Vazilek remote links can be a bit twitchy, what with all their security protocols. After all, unmanned ships can’t be left as easy pickings for anyone with a comm link and a computer. But I’ll get it done. The real trick is going to be you,” he looked at the docto
r, “getting all of us and the provisions we’ll need aboard these two ships and then you,” he said, turning back to Lindy, “being able to fly them out of here in the midst of an explosion the likes of which none of us has ever seen. You two are the ones that are going to have to craft a bit of magic. So you had best get to it.”
He clasped both the doctor and Lindy by a shoulder, gently pushing them out of the control room and toward the lift. “Go with the doctor, Willet,” he said. “He is going to need your help, and there is nothing for you to do here until we are ready to leave. When you get to the lift just press the area on the panel that is backlit in green and it will lower you to the floor. I’ll make the rest of the arrangements from here.” With that he returned to his seat and went to work.
Hours later, somehow everything had been accomplished. It had taken a near miracle of organization on the part of Nelsik’s men and a great deal of assistance from the dogs, but it had been done. Even Steenini had pitched in, as he had somehow managed to reprogram the colony’s system of cargo trains for use by the Akadeans, allowing them to ferry a great deal of the provisions that were needed from the storerooms to the ships with infinitely less hardship.
When the freighters were fully stocked with food, everyone—man and beast—had been crammed into every available nook and cranny the vessels possessed. O’Keefe lay unconscious in the small autodoc that served as a sick bay on the command freighter, Beccassit and Regulus there with him, while Lindy and Steenini manned the cramped control room.
The Empty Warrior Page 61
