The Prize: Book One (46 page)

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 from 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.

“Hello, Tandy.  Having fun?”  A soft voice asked.  General Tandy screamed in terror, scrambling backward away from the whisper.  He knew that voice, knew it well.

“PENN!”  He sobbed.

“You look like you're enjoying yourself.”  Penn moved out of the shadows, impossibly clean and well fed.  He came over and squatted on his heels, so he was eye-to-eye with the General.

Tandy moaned.  ”Kill me,” he whispered.

“What?  I didn't hear you,” Penn asked.

“Kill me please!  Kill me and get it over with!”  Anything was better than running from that nightmare out there waiting for him.  He saw Penn nod, as if he understood, and hope flared.

“Why would I want to do that?  You are doing such a great job of doing that yourself,” he laughed at the expression on Tandy's face.  ”I'm here to make you an offer.”

“An offer?”  Tandy blinked several times, trying to understand the context.  Penn didn't make offers.  He was an animal, a mad psychopathic monster.  What could he have to offer?

“Would you like to get out of here?”  He waved his hand at the surrounding jungle.  ”Not that this is such a bad place.  I grow up in a playground like this, did you know?”

“Yes… yes... please… get me out of here.”  Tears of shame ran down his cheek.  He never in his life thought he would beg anyone for anything, especially Penn.

Penn stood, and in a blink of an eye, they were standing in an open plaza just as the sun was rising.  Tandy looked around in disbelief, then up in awe.  They stood in front of the great pyramid.  The top was ablaze with golden fire.  The daylight terminator raced down its face, banishing the night shadow back where it came from.  In a small flash of light, someone else was standing in the plaza with him, and it took him a moment to process what was happening.  Then he saw Ellis and swore, taking a step toward her.

”You traitorous bitch!” he snarled as he lifting the improvised machete.  She smiled, as if daring him to try and his arm dropped in defeat.

“So what do you want to get me out of here, Penn?”

“Want?”  He looked at General Tandy a moment and laughed.  ”You have nothing I want, but I have something you want.”

“I want… yes, I want to go home.”  It came out sounding like a sob.

“All you have to do to go home is walk through that portal over there.”

“What…  I don't understand… how.”

“You could say that it's a gateway, a sort of transportation device to get you home.”  Tandy looked at him with suspicion.  Penn didn't, wouldn't do him any favors.  There had to be a catch.

“Is that all?”

“Yes, just walk through that doorway over there, and you will soon be home again.

“I don't believe you.  It's a death trap!”

“Could be, but as I see it you have three choices.  One you can stay out here and starve to death, Two, let the monster chasing you catch up, or three, walk through the doorway.  Your choice.”

“There is a fourth choice, Richard.”

“Really?”  Penn and Tandy looked at Ellis.

“He could slit his own throat and die!”  Ellis's smile was anything but nice. 

“Go to hell, the both of you.  I'm not walking through that doorway, no matter what you promise.  It's a trap!  Never trust and Earthman, or woman!”  Tandy snarled as they turned away.

“Suit yourself, Tandy.”  Hand in hand, they walked through the portal.