The Prize: Book One

by Rob Buckman

  “Please be seated.” The Director intoned with an indolent wave of his hand, his voice as dry as dust, the tone as cold as a winter frost.

  "Thank you, Sir. I came as quickly as possible.” General Tandy smiled thinly nonetheless.

  A polite call from this man asking you to come and see him was equal to a royal command, and not something taken lightly. After the Emperor himself, Director Markoff was the second most powerful man in the realm, and from this office controlled nine tenths of the Tellurian Empire. A decidedly unmilitary gallop would be a more apt word to describe the General's undignified progress through the Palace complex. The Palace staff and guards knew where he was going by his rate of progress, and most smiled to hide their own discomfort at receiving such a summons. The General took a seat, noting the data pad sitting in the middle of the blotter as he did. It was impossible to tell Director's age, what with 'e-long' treatments. Some said he was at least 280 standard Tellurian years old and going strong.

  Some carefully whispered that he'd outlived, or disposed of anyone who threatened his or the Emperor's position, and kept the remainder of the so-called 'elite', and self-aggrandizing power brokers within the far-flung reaches of the Empire in line with the contents of his massive data bank. More than one, of the so-called untouchable upper class, had their wives, children, or other family members go missing for a short while. Most returned unharmed, but not always. Placing his cap on the table beside the blotter, General Tandy sat, and tried to make himself relax through sheer force of will, it partly worked.

  "We have a problem, General. One that I hope you can help solve.” The dry voice continued as the Director's eyes skipped from one holoscreen to another until his gaze settled on one in particular.

  "And what would that be Director?” Tandy felt his gut tighten.

  General Tandy would have liked to read something comforting into the 'we' and 'you' statement but didn't. He was good at solving the Director's problems, and the main reasons he stayed alive so long. That in itself didn't guarantee he would remain so. Shortly after taking command of the Special Services Division of Imperial Security, he'd heard through rumor control that his predecessor had taken early 'retirement' as it was euphemistically called. Tandy suspected he was still serving the Emperor. His ashes were probably fertilizing the Palace flower gardens like so many others before him if the truth be told. It was amazing how much the fertile soil around the Palace ground had increased in the last hundred years. Especial considered the fact the gardeners had never imported any. It went without saying, that anything he could do for the Director to prolong his own existence was a foregone conclusion.

  Turning to face the General, the Director leaned back in his soft comfortable chair, elbows on the armrest as it automatically adjusted to his new position. With a casual flip of his wrist, he pointed his index finger toward a screen on the wall to his right. The holoscreen flickered a moment as his implant sorted through the index of stored images, steadying and enlarging to cover the whole right wall with a view of a beautiful blue-green planet as seen from a high orbit.

  "Imperial Startography Institute tell me that this planet is designated Sigma Alpha Prime, and no ship of any kind, dares go closer to it than one AU of this planet without being destroyed. By that I mean, being violently pulled down as if caught in the gravity well of a black hole.”

  "I see.” Tandy wasn't sure he did, but he felt uncomfortable saying nothing.

  "Do you?” The Director eyes flicked around to meet the General's for a moment, his lips tightened as if he'd bitten into something sour. “The planet has a string of warning buoys around it in a polar orbit just beyond the one AU boundary, broadcasting in a multitude of alien languages.” The Director's voice had an edge to it the General hadn't heard before, something that sounded suspiciously like anger, or maybe it was just his overactive imagination.

  “Had the Captain of the heavy cruiser taken the time to decipher the meanings of the message, or simply waited for a science team, he might be alive today.” The Director leaned forward slightly and looked at the screen pensively.

  “We shall never know if he did or did not understand the message, or simply chose to ignore the warning. This, I might add, turned out to be easy to decipher. Either way the stupid man paid for that mistake with his life when his ship was literally dragged out of the sky the moment it crossed the boundary line, and crashed on the surface.” The Director paused for a moment, almost as if waiting for General Tandy to ask the obvious question, and he did.

  “How so, Sir?” General Tandy asked, keeping his voice neutral. He also had to refraining from laughing as he tried to make sense out of what the Director was saying. Starships do not fall, or get pulled out of space. That was blatantly absurd. The ship must have crashed, although the idea of a starship crashing into a planet was ridiculous in this day and age.

  “As I said. No ship of any size can survive past the proscribed one AU limit.” The Director paused a moment, pursing his lips as if unsure of the words to use, then continued. “Normally there is no way a planet of that mass has a gravitational attraction of that magnitude, or anywhere near it for that matter, yet it has.” The Director's left shoulder made a slight movement that some might interpret it as a shrug. ”It's a pity the stupid Captain had to take a valuable ship, and so many highly trained individuals with him on his untimely death plunge.”

  General Tandy kept his eyes fixed on the Director, almost as if mesmerizes by the Director's voice as much as what he was saying. With an effort, he pulled his eyes away and for a moment looked around the lavishly furnished office. The priceless statues and artwork strategically place around the room said much as to the Director's power and influence.

  "Since then we have attempted to land several types of vessels, including several shuttlecraft, two destroyers and one super-dreadnought. He paused a moment. “All, I might add, except one crashed with no survivors.” The Director seemed to read off the list of ships that crashed with no more emotion than a man ordering lunch.

  The General winced slightly and raised his eyebrows in shock. That was a lot or resources in ships, and crews to write off investigating some mystery planet. To Tandy's mind, the benefits didn't appear to outweigh the cost.

  “What matters is that no ship that lands, or I should say crash lands, on the planet can take off again, no matter how powerful.”

  Discretion being the better part of valor, General Tandy said nothing. Superdreadnoughts were expensive, and to order one in to investigate this unknown phenomenon meant that this discussion had serious implications. General Tandy swiveled his chair around and looked at the planetary system schematic with the associated data beside each icon in the video screen. It showed the planet's orbital path around its star, declination, mass and numerous additional details. The first odd thing he noted was that this planetary system consisted of nothing more than a white dwarf star and one planet. Very odd. It had no other celestial bodies, no asteroid belt and no moons. The star and its single planet hung in a region of empty space with no visible background of stars. The Director also failed to mention a planet of that size, and class shouldn't even be within the life zone that far from the parent star. In fact, the planet shouldn't even have liquid water as it obvious did. The numbers showed that Sigma Alpha Prime massed about one and one half times that of Tellurian Prime with a corresponding higher gravity. Even so, it didn't explain why the Director was so interested in this one miserable planet, other than some peculiar gravitational anomaly?

  "One shuttle craft did manage to land, or I should say crash land, but within a few days the crew and ten Imperial trooper were all dead.” The Director stopped, eyeing the General as if waiting for him to make a comment.

  “Atmosphere?”

  “No. The troop leader reported the air was breathable, and there was no immediate sign of anything hostile or dangerous fauna or flora. Tandy then asked the most obvious question.

  "And why do we need to land on the particul
ar planet? Other than curiosity as to the gravitational anomaly?” The Director gave him a chilling look, then tempered it, forgetting for a moment that the General didn't have all the facts.

  "Do you know what drives the Empire General?" The Director asked in a deceptively soft voice, one perfectly shaped eyebrow raised slightly in question.

  General Tandy suddenly felt his arm pits get wet, suspecting a trap. On face value, the question could be answered several ways, and he quickly settled on the most politically correct answer.

  "Because our way of life is the best...” A slight shake of the Director's head was sufficient to halt him in mid-sentence.

  "No General.”

  While he spoke, the Director took something out of a draw and placed a small, flat metal box on the table. After touching a button on top, carefully unscrewed the lid and moved it to one side. The moment he did, a paper-thin disk of silver-gray material lifted out of the box, hovering several inches above the tabletop.

  "It is this," he said, opened his hands like a magician showing his latest trick.

  "I see," General Tandy muttered, not that he did. He looked at the disk but saw nothing remarkable about it, other than it hovered several inches above the desktop.

  "I don't think you do, General. At enormous cost, our solar-sphere mining operation on 'Furnace' collects, refines and produce enough of this material to drive us to the stars. This material gives us control over fusion power, lifts our ships into orbit, and gives us the ability to use jump point gateways, plus a host of other things.” He paused for a moment as if to let the information sink through the General's thick scull.

  “It also keeps our military forces, and the Empire expanding into new productive territories… and you employed." He added, making it sound like an afterthought, but wasn't.

  "Yes Sir.” General Tandy felt the sweat trickling down his side despite the air-conditioning. Silently wondering what was so captivating about a damn Cg disk?

  Although hellishly expensive, and inferior to the one the Director had, you could purchase small contra gravity disks in any number of places, including toy stores. These contained a tiny amount of Cg material, and at best could just lift themselves a fraction of an inch above any surface, not several inches as this one did. It was a good bet the disk the Director had was 80 to 90% pure Cg. Once mixed with the right metal, and with a properly regulated power source it could lift a million ton warship into orbit and beyond to the stars. Except for luxury ground transport for the elite, anything that once had wheels now use a small amount of this material in its chassis or frame. From floor cleaning bots and toys, to trucks and mag-lift transport. He brought his attention back to what the Director was saying.

  "Without this, we would be nothing more than some warring backwater planet, like so many others out there.”

  “What is so important about Cg material, Sir?” Tandy asked in a soft voice.

  “Simply this. Our expansion into new, productive areas of the galaxy is strictly limited by the amount of this substance we can collect, refine, and incorporate into the hulls of our starships.” The Director didn't try to hide the note of rebuke in his answer.

  "Yes Director.” General Tandy kept himself ridged in his seat. It didn't explain the Director's interest in some nameless planet, or the expenditure of so many resources

  “Just replacing ships lost in battle is straining the refineries to their limits,” as if reading the General's mind, “but you must be asking yourself what is the connection between this," he gave a slight nod toward the hovering silvery disk before pointing over his shoulder with a lax hand to another screen, "and that?"

  The camera view changed and zoomed in to reveal a massive pyramid shaped building on the planet surface. The building was so immense the tip protruded above the atmosphere into space. Director Markoff waved a soft white hand at the data pad in front of the General.

  "Over the past several months, Imperial Intelligence had put together a dossier of all available off-world evidence, and related materials concerning this planet and that building.” The Director paused for a moment to flick some imaginary dust off his coat sleeve. “Much of it is myth or legend and such, with fragments of religious cult worship thrown in for good measure. Those we can ignore as wishful thinking.” The Director didn't bother hiding the note of contempt in his voice at such ignorant thinking.

  “In a nutshell, this building,” the Director nodded toward the image on the wall screen,” is proposed to have existed for several million years if we are to believe off-world history. Maybe longer according to some documents.” He let the words hang in the air a moment, hoping the General understood the significance of the time frame.

  “It is also claimed by some off-world historians as having been built by an ancient race, one of, or maybe even the first intelligent species in this galaxy.”

  “And where are these supposed super being now?” For a supposedly intelligent Tellurian, General Tandy wondered for a moment if the Director wasn't losing his grip believing in all this brak shit.

  “The documents indicated they have long since departed our dimension for another.”

  As he spoke, Markoff carefully placed the lid over the silver disk. He touched the button on top to hold the Cg disk in the capture field, and with a slight pressure pushed the lid down and screwed it shut. Moving the box to one side, he placed his hand on a particular spot on the desktop, his fingertip caressed the smooth surface as if examining it for imperfections.

  "Why in the name of the Sainted Mother would these beings build something like that?” General Tandy asked, nodding toward the holoscreen.

  He felt out of his depth here, seeing no connection between the Cg disk, what the Director was saying and the holo of some strange building on an impossible planet. General Tandy pursed his lips in thought. If the building is as old and as big as it appeared, why was there no damage to the surface? The high-resolution images showed no discernible marks, or blemishes, such as meteor strikes, or aging on any of the four triangular surfaces. General Tandy pulled at his lower lip thoughtfully, not believing what he was seeing. That building was no more than fifty, maybe a hundred years old at the most.

  "I am coming to that.” The Director turned his chair slightly to look directly at the screen. “Before crashing, our recon probes detected a staggering number of wrecked starships scattered about the surface. It supports the documentation that this effect has been going on for an extraordinarily long time, maybe millennia as some claim. However, we only have fragmentary evidence anyone ever succeeded in landing, or crash landing and live to tell about it.” The Director's casual description of the wrecked starships was something of an understatement.

  In some places, it looked as if the surface had suffered planetary bombardment by the number of craters scattered about the two large continental landmasses. Yet, surprisingly, there were no craters of any kind near to the pyramid shaped building.

  "If this was indeed built by some extinct race, the technology they employed would be light years in advance of ours. Especially if they are able to drag starships out of space at that distance.” Even General Tandy's limited imagination could see the possibilities of using such technology as a planetary defense weapon.

  "True. However, there is a second overriding reason we wish to land and take off from that planet.” He deliberately stopped, forcing the General to tear his eyes away from the screen and ask the obvious question.

  "And that is Sir?"

  "Our esteemed scientists repeatedly tell me that the only place we can obtain Cg material is in the photosphere of a particular type of star, a brown dwarf to be exact.” Then he dropped the bombshell. “Yet our analysis of the probes data tells me that, that building is composed entirely of Cg material.”

  "Sainted Mother!” General Tandy breathed, his eye locking on the seemingly innocent looking box for a moment, then back to the holoscreen.

  “That would indeed be a very good reason to go there.” The thought
was staggering. If the building was composed entirely of this material, whoever controlled it, and had the means to land and take off, could name his own price.

  "If that wasn't sufficient inducement for us to expend valuable resources,” the Director continued as if he hadn't heard the General's comment, his attention more on the screen and the possibilities than his 'visitor'. “Before they crashed, the survey probes reported massive deposits of Cg material all over the planet.”

  "But…” General Tandy did a slow double take, first at the Director, then the screen, then back to the Director. “I believe you just said the only place to obtain Cg material, was from the photosphere of a brown dwarf?” General Tandy felt his mouth go dry as the implications dawned on him.

  "So my scientists keep telling me. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” The Director's thin lips twitched in what some might suspect was a smile. The General knew better, this man didn't know how to smile.