The Prize: Book One

by Rob Buckman

  "Did you get to the control room, Major?” he saw Penn grin. For some reason that smile sent a chill up his spine. ”Can we land?”

  "Oh yes we did… we are standing in it, and no you can't land.”

  "Then why is Penn still alive?” His voice lowered to a growl.

  "I'm a lot harder to kill than you think, Tandy, especially now.”

  "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "Your pet killer failed, 'General'. By now, he's nothing more than a pile of monster crap. Him and both his buddies,” Penn lied.

  "Why can't we land? If you have the prize you can turn this gravitational effort off, can't you?” He held out one last hope that she was on his side, or at least the Empire's.

  “I can send a ship down for you and get you out of there, and send down mining equipment…” Even before he'd finished speaking, Ellis was shaking her head. Slipping his hand into his pocket, below the camera view angle, he took out two triggering devises, one for each of them, sliding his thumb over each to enter his biometric code.

  "I don't think you understand, General. No one can ever land here, and there will be no mining on this planet by the Empire. Not now or, in the future." Ellis smiled.

  “But why?”

  “Because we said so, that's why.” The smile on their faces got broader.

  “You traitorous bitch!” he snapped.

  “That would all depend on your point of view, Tandy,” Penn answered for her. ”She had never betrayed me, unlike some people I could name.”

  "Then you are both dead, Penn. You first, then her, after I get finished with her that is.” His smirk gave way to a snarl as he hit the send button. ”I'm going to enjoy torturing her.” Even taking into account the lag time, nothing happened, except that Penn began to smile.

  He touched the back of his neck and pulled the collar down so Tandy could see. There was no scar from the implantation, and General Tandy felt his knees get weak. The savage had found a way to remove the device from both of them without killing himself or the woman.

  "That's impossible... the device would have triggered if you tried to take it out.” His hands fumbled at the controls, boosting the signal gain to high in the forlorn hope Penn was lying.

  “Tandy, you have no idea what you're dealing with here, and you never will. As of today, Ellis and I control this planet. And, we are coming to get you.”

  Tandy stabbed frantically at the comm button on his console. ”OPEN FIRE AND DESTROY THAT DAMN BUILDING!” He yelled as he cut the connection.

  As if waiting for just such a command, all the ship of the massive battle fleet fired simultaneously. A virtual cloud of destructive missiles leapt into space and arced downward toward the pyramid. Within minutes the nuclear, and pump x-ray warheads detonated on the surface. The atmosphere above the pyramid boiled, turning the area into a cauldron of hellfire. Even as the first missile impacted on the surface, the fleet maneuvered into position to bring its main energy weapons to bear. So intense was fire on the pyramid, General Tandy had to shade his eyes from the glare. The fleet fired for ten minutes before their fire control shut the weapons down to prevent overheating. The afterglow slowly faded and to Tandy's horror, seeing the building still standing, unscathed.

  "Mother preserve us!” Tandy muttered, feeling his knees give way. He flopped back into his seat and stabbed the control console with a shaky finger.

  That much firepower direct against one building on a planet surface should have reduced it to nothing more than a glowing crater in the ground. The Director's words about alien technology came back to haunt him. Somehow, Penn and the traitorous bitch had found out how to control whatever was protecting the building. If the combined firepower of this fleet wasn't able to destroy it, there was no sense in continuing to waste energy and missiles.

  “Stand down, Captain.” The words tasted bitter in his mouth.

  Fleet Captain Var Sarnoff Melche eyed his battle tank with displeasure as he obeyed General Tandy's orders. After seeing how ineffective his fleet's weapons were against the structure, he had to agree with the General, but he didn't like it.

  “Send to all units. Bring shields to full power.” Captain Melche ordered, fearing the worst.

  “Aye-aye, Sir. All units to bring shields to full power.” Captain Melche knew it was a prudent move, as there no telling what offensive weapons might be in that building. Just then, a side screen on Captain Melche's chair flickered to life. A comm tech appeared.

  “Sir! I have report from our forward picket ships that they are having difficulty holding position.”

  “Say again?” Captain Melche answered, wondering why his comm tech thought it necessary to relay something so unimportant at this moment, instead of his second in command.

  “Our picket ships report they are having difficulty holding their positions, Captain. They say that it as if something is pushing them away.”

  “Tell them to push back and hold position.”

  “They are Captain…” Captain Melche watched his screen update to show the tracks of his picket ships slowly being repelled away from the planet. Worse, it showed his ship slowly leaving orbit outside the one AU exclusion zone.

  “Helm! Hold us in position.”

  “Sir! I'm trying…” The helmsman replied. Gradually, more and more ships began moving out of position away from the planet, except his.

  Some unknown force was pulling his ship toward the planet. He watched with a growing sense of panic as his fleet accelerated toward the hyper-limit. ”Helm! Get us out of here!” For the first time in many years, Captain Melche prayed to gods he'd long ago stopped believing in. He heard the hull begin to groan in protest against the opposing forces.

  "Captain Melche! What in the name of the Holy Mother is happening?” Tandy shouted into his comm.

  “That infernal planet is trying to drag us down, that's what is happening, General!”

  "Then get us out of here!”

  "What do you think I'm trying to do?” The Captain replied tensely. ”All drive systems are 30%. . . 40%. . . 50% over max and we are still falling.”

  “Captain! I don't care how much you strain those engines, get us the hell out of here, or we are all dead!” Tandy yelled back, his voice edging into panic.

  “If I overdrive those fusion bottles, I'll irradiate and kill everyone in the engine room…”

  “I don't give a shit about the half illiterate gutter trash in your engine room! Get us out of here now! That's an order!”

  The Captain cut the connection. He knew in his gut the General was right, but he hated to follow his order. With a ship as powerful as his, there was little in the galaxy he couldn't outfight or outrun. Until now. He watched in horrid fascination as his escort ships vanished into the distance. For a moment, his dreadnought hang in the blackness, the hull straining around him as the massive engines struggled in vain to pull away. The hull groaned in protest as mainframes and cross members bent under the stress. Slowly the ship's engines lost the battle, and his ship began its death plunge toward the distant blue-green planet. Tandy felt like sobbing, damning Penn, the Director, and even the Emperor to hell. The planet was dragging them down against the full output of the dreadnought's massive drive system even at this distance. He watched on the screen as the scattered fleet vanished toward the safety, wishing he were on one of those ships instead, feeling sick as they plunged toward the surface.

  Downing a second stiff drink, he pulled himself together and contemplated his next move, ignoring the groaning sounds. He considered staying aboard. It was possible they might survive the crash with the right preparation. Penn and that traitorous bitch Ellis has survived. They had enough food, water, and power to last them a long time. Maybe, just maybe, with the resources at his disposal, he could get to the Prize himself. With over a thousand Marines, and three thousand Naval personnel, he should be able to cobble together a fighting force large enough to take on anything this planet threw at them. And they had tanks… A particularly lou
d 'sprang' as a cross brace bucking pulled him out of his feverish contemplation. Tandy's plan crumbled to dust as the ship's emergency system came to life.

  “ATTENTION ALL PERSONNEL! HULL BREACH IMMINENT IN MULTIPLE LOCATIONS! ABANDON SHIP! ABANDON SHIP! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! ALL PERSONNEL ARE TO ABANDON SHIP IMMEDIATELY!”

  “Captain! What the hell is happening?”

  “The hull is starting the buckle you idiot! Can't you hear it?” Tandy watched as the Captain looked around and up at the deckhead.

  “I have ordered all personnel to abandon ship. Stay here if you want, Tandy, but I'd advise you to do the same. My crew and I are out of here…” With that, Captain Melche cut the connection.

  The alarms started then. Warnings blared for fire, gas, hull breach, and so many others that General Tandy couldn't tell what they were all for. It didn't matter. One last look at Captain Melche's ashen face told him everything he needed to know. This ship was doomed.

  “Damn you to hell, Penn!” Part of the overhead crashed to the deck, missing him by inches.

  A fury tore through him as he realized he'd placed his career and now his life in jeopardy. Even if he survived this crash, the Director wouldn't take his failure lightly. Hull plates groaned and buckled around him as he made his way quickly to the outer office. His escort was already waiting, looking a little ashen, eyeing the deckhead for more falling objects. Tandy just prayed the hatch would still open and it did, at least partially. With the help of his men, they managed to force the hatch open far enough for him to squeeze through, but it cost them precious seconds. The main lighting went off except for the eerie red emergency lighting. Tandy shivered as it made it look as if they were already in Hell. Together they stumbled down the buckled passageway, the walls slowly twisting out of shape. Any semblance of discipline vanished, as crewmembers ran in different directions in an attempt to escape, but he didn't care. His escort pushed and shoved the passing crew out of their way as they fought their way to the lifeboat station, but his momentary elation at reaching the station vanished when they discovered the hatch wouldn't open. One of his men rushed to the next bay fifty feet down, but this wouldn't open either.

  “The escape trunk, there's a lifeboat station on the next deck down.” The team leader yelled over the bedlam of screaming people, and the groaning hull.

  Knocking the dogs off, a trooper ripped the hatchway open, finding the escape truck full of people. He pulled the first unlucky crewman off the ladder and shot him, but one look told him they had trouble. Somewhere below a woman screamed that her leg was stuck. Without hesitation, the IMPSEC trooper started firing down the escape trunk. More people screamed, and rather than waiting for the bodies to fall out of the way, the trooper simply jumped into the truck and fell onto the luckless people below. They cushioned his fall, as he knew they would, and fell to the bottom of the shaft in a slow motion cascade of bodies.

  “It's clear, General!” He yelled back up the shaft, but General Tandy was already on his way down with the rest of the team.

  Thankfully, the next escape hatch opened when he pulled the lever and he stood there a moment surveyed the madhouse the lifeboat station had become. People fought to enter the few remaining life pods, desperate to escape the doomed ship. Tandy's Security team was as vicious as anyone onboard, kicked and punched their way through the mob, removing anyone that got in his way, including a club-wielding sailor guarding the entrance to one of the last life pods. Tandy shot him and kicked his dead body out of the way.

  “In here!” He yelled.

  The six troopers tore through the pod, ruthlessly shooting the occupants and dragging their bodies out to make room for the General. Tandy climbed in, not even bothering to thank the troopers who had saved his life. The few crew members struggled against the door, hoping to squeeze into the small pod, but Tandy's men shot then and shoved them back out and hit the close switch. The moment it closed, the pod was now on automatic, and they quickly scrambled into the acceleration couch before the countdown reached zero. At last, the pod blasted itself free from the doomed ship, and sweet relief flooded through Tandy's body for a brief moment.

  “General! Something's wrong.” A trooper near the forward view port exclaimed.

  “What… what's wrong?” The feeling of relief replaced with an icy knot of fear.

  “Look!” Their upward flight was brief, unlike the rest of the escaping pods.

  Tandy scrambled over and looked through the port, realizing that like the mother ship, they were falling toward the planet. They were going to crash.

  For a moment, General Tandy refused to believe what he saw, thinking it an illusion. In the end, he couldn't deny it and scrambled back away from the port until his back hit the rear bulkhead. He sat there speechless, his face pulled into a mask of frozen terror as the planet in the view port rushed toward him. He wanted to scream, but couldn't as he waited for the final bone crushing impact. In the end, self-preservation kicked in and in a forlorn hope he'd survive the crash, Tandy scrambled into the shock webbing, praying to the all wise Mother of the Prophet to let him live. The escape shuttle hit, bouncing, and twisting as it careened from tree to tree through the underbrush, tumbling end over end, and it was then Tandy managed to scream.

  “Damn you to hell, Penn!” He managed before he lost consciousness.

  CHAPTER - FORTY SIX: Landing and survival

  From the Thrakee and Silurian's point of view, nothing appeared to change. The Empire still existed in all its might, and the Imperial navy still patrolled its borders. Words of uprising, and rebellions travel at the speed of light, and many times the Empire crushed the rebellion, or put down the uprising before the news ever reached outside its borders. Within hours, the infighting started as one power block after another maneuvered themselves into position to make a grab for the throne. Civil war did break out in some systems as planet after planet sought to get out from under the Imperial thumb, while the Thrakee and the Silurian fleets probed for weak spots along the Empire's borders, but that wasn't unusual in such a large Empire.

  These were all the things Richard and Ellis hoped would provide the narrow window of opportunity to rebuild Earth. The longer it took to restore order, the longer it would be before they send out explorations ships, or so they hoped. Penn and Ellis set out to tie up the last few loose ends and set up home for the lost children on Alpha Sigma Prime. They even took time out to investigate the wonders of a null-g shower, and water, soap, and slippery bodies. Soap and water was the last thing on General Tandy's mind as he struggled through the dense jungle. His once immaculate uniform now reduced to tattered rags. All he wore now was his filthy underwear and a pair of discarded shorts he'd found. They'd fit him well a few weeks ago, but he'd lost so much weight that he now had to hold them up around his skinny waist with string. His elegant dress shoes, once so soft and comfortable, now were nothing but a distant memory. Both sucked off his feet in first stinking mud holes he stepped into, not that they would have lasted much longer in this wet rotting, green hell.

  Madness lurked behind his eyes as he chopped his way through the tangle mat of vegetation with an improvised machete, nothing more than a flat length of battle-steel with rags wrapped around one end to make a handle. His dirty, mud streaked skin was a mass of welts, cuts, and insects bite that itched and burned when sweat ran into them, but he was passed the point of caring now. All he wanted to do was to get away from the horrible monster chasing him. The monster appeared as a beautiful young girl, naked and alive, beckoning him with open arms and an enticing smile, but he wasn't fooled. He'd seen the clear plastic cylinder strapped to her young body, waiting to detonate the moment she had him in her embrace. She wanted to kill him, hold him against her supple young body with her arms of steel. He could almost feel the ball bearing ripping through him as she joyfully immolated herself in a flash of light. How he'd survived after the crash, he didn't know. He knew, he and thousands of others who failed to escape in the life pods, had staggered away f
rom the ship in bewilderment.

  Instead of crashing like so many others before it, his super-dreadnought, the pride of the Imperial fleet, the pinnacle of Imperial technology, lay there like some beached leviathan of the deep, impotent, and useless. He scrambled away like the others, all sense of military discipline gone as he kicked and fought his way through the struggling mass. He'd stopped at last on a hill overlooking the landing site, and for a moment thought about going back. Crashed it might, but it did hold food, water, and several items he could use. Then he saw the ship start to crumple inward. The ship slowly flattened as if some giant hand was pressing down on it, the girders and beams snapping audibly even at that distance, battle-steel plates bucking and folding like so much paper and cardboard. He didn't even try to guess at the number of gravities it took to flatten a ship like that, but he knew that if he'd been inside, he be nothing more than a red smear on the deck plates. There was no chance of salvaging anything from her now, other than the metal itself, but that was useless without a furnace. Tandy spent another miserable night in the shelter of some alien wreckage, thankful that he hadn't suffered the same fate as the poor devils trapped inside. As the long hours passed, his mind began to wander, and he realized that if he had died in a crash like the aliens who once owned this ship he was sleeping in, he'd no longer have to worry about the monster chasing him.