The Prize: Book One (2 page)

Tandy knew better than to take the liberty of sitting in one of the precisely placed easy chairs around the table, and would not until the Director stopped work and acknowledged his presence.  The delay wasn't impolite, or something the Director did to make guests or visitors feel ill at ease, he didn't need such devices.  It was just his way.  For many, the inside of this office was almost the last thing they ever saw, except for the well lighted, blindingly white rooms below.  The air-conditioning whispered softly as it pumped cold fragrant air into the room, but too cold for the General's taste.  It did however help evaporate the fear-sweat from his forehead, for which he was thankful.  At last, the Director placed the data pad he was reading on atop a pile on his right, meticulously squaring its edges with the rest before looking up to acknowledging his visitor.

Director Goff Markoff was a slight, fastidious-looking individual of indeterminate age, tight-faced, with hard, snake cold, black eyes that bored right through you.  It felt as if he were cataloging your sins from the moment they were born.  The Director's parchment yellow face gave no indication as to the thoughts, or feeling behind them, if any.  Neither General Tandy, nor anyone else had ever seen the Director angry, sad, or any other revealing emotion they could name.  The General suspected the fate of some luckless individual summoned to the Director's office, was something of complete indifference to him.

With the thumb of his left hand resting on his chin, the Director smoothed a fashionable, pencil-thin line of hair over his upper lip while he took in every detail of his visitor, missing nothing.  Including the drying fear-sweat on the General's brow.  Using the pretense of straightening his jacket the Director glanced down at the readouts along the edge of his desk, noting the dips and spikes on the sensor screen with satisfaction.  The intricate golden swirls and gracefully curved grain of the highly polished Tarl wood table he used for a desk provided a perfect camouflage for the finely tuned detector system buried in the surface.   Just by standing close to the table, the Director had a clear reading of their emotional state, as well as his, or her truthfulness.  In the General Tandy's case, it showed he was sufficiently nervous, which was good for the purpose at hand, yet had himself under tight control.  To the Director's eye, the General was a short, powerfully built man whose face, even after his first 'e-long' treatment spoke of long, hard service to the Emperor and Empire.  He stood at rigid attention at the other end of the table, impeccably dressed in Imperial dress grays, his peaked cap tucked neatly under his left arm as if awaiting the presentation of a medal, or a firing squad.  Like all the Tellurian Var elites, he had the classic dark brown skin, and the nose ridge that ran from the center of his high forehead to the tip of his nose, whereas the Director had neither.  If the General felt ill at ease, nothing showed on his craggy face, other than the slight sheen on his forehead, and his out-thrust jaw, looking as if he expected to take a punch at any moment.  In passing, the Director noted the multiple rows of gleaming medals on the General's chest and inwardly sneered.

The General considered himself brave, suppressing rebellions and such, or orbital bombardment of a planet into a lifeless ball of glowing rock.  He may have actually killed a few people in combat, but that number paled into insignificance compared to the number the Director killed as head of Imperial Security. But that aside, this wasn't about who was the most efficient killer.

"General Var Tandy” To General Tandy's ear, the Director sounded genuinely surprised by his appearance. “I'm so pleased you could take time out of your busy schedule to come and see me.”  In fact, the Director wasn't pleased, and if his information was correct, and it usually was, the General wasn't busy.

He'd been in bed with the daughter of a Planetary Governor at the time his message arrived.  An underage young woman at that, and probably making promises he never intended to keep, as usual.  Thankfully, it wasn't a Governor's wife this time, and he didn't have to arrange for the said Governor and his family meet with an unfortunate air-car accident before the whole affair turned into a public scandal.

The General was supposedly a Var, a member of the planet's elite class, and should know better, but, like most of his breed, he had the morals and appetite of a pig.  Even so, the General and the rest of the so-called upper class all danced to his tune, a Surl, or low born, the once crippled son of a garbage collector.  Not that he cared any longer.  He knew all the so-called highborn hated him because of his position, and the fact he didn't have a Var in front of his name.  Rightly, they attributed his present position as head of Imperial Intelligence, and Security to his ruthlessly efficiency, and by eliminating anyone that stood in his way.  Bodies of friend and foe alike littered his rise to power.

“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.