THE PRIZE: BOOK TWO - RETRIBUTION, page 10
“Director Markoff… I… I’m pleased to receive your call.” From her startled expression, she was anything but pleased.
“Please be assured Administrator Bema, this call is merely for information.” Bema then saw something few people had ever seen. Director Markoff smiling.
“I… I see. How may I be of service Director?” Markoff knew how most people felt when receiving a direct call from him, and attempted to put her mind at ease.
“I was very impressed by your honesty the other day when the last Director had his unfortunate… terminal medical condition.”
“I was glad to be of service, Director.” Greta Bema felt her sphincter tighten so much it started eating the seat cover.
“Just so. My call is in the nature of an enquiry into your department’s efforts to ascertain the location of the planet Earth.” For a moment, the sharp faced woman’s features blanched. It was delightful to see her take a deep breath before answering.
“I’m sorry to report we’ve had no luck reconstructing the database, other than the general region of where the planet might be.” If she had ever wondered what the seat cover she was sitting on tasted like, now she knew. It was in the back of her throat.
“Just so, and as I suspected. The person who infected the system did an adequate job of ensuring his accursed planet wouldn’t be located quickly. To what end I’m not sure. He has to know we’ll find it eventually… no more than five years, and then what?” Greta thought it odd the Director Markoff would impart so much information to someone in her position.
“I couldn’t say, Director.”
“Come come. You have a keen mind Administrator Bema. What would you surmise his objective was in hiding the location of his planet, even for such a short period of time?” A slight frown pulled at her brow, and he could see her relaxing slightly. This was an intellectual challenge, and something she enjoyed exercising her mind on.
“If I were to speculate…” She hesitated, cocking her head to one side slightly as if unsure of the answer she should give.
“Please, speculate away. I’d like to see if someone else can come to the same conclusion I did.” Markoff lied as he leaned back in his comfortable chair, enjoying the play of emotions across her face. His unfailing ability to read people told him she was relaxing, but still suspicious that this was some sort of a verbal trap. “As an aside, are you free for dinner tonight, Administrator Bema?” That question took them both by surprise, as he’d never intentionally thought to ask her, or anyone to have dinner with him.
“Dinner?” She asked, as if unsure what that was, feeling that tightening sensation in her rear end again.
“Yes, dinner, here at the palace.”
“I…I don’t know what to say… I never thought...” She drew a deep breath. “Yes, I’d be delighted to have dinner with you, Director.” Not that she was in a position to refuse, as one, he’d placed her in the position of being the new administrator of the Imperial Startography Institute, and two, he was the Director of the dreaded Imperial Security. On the other hand, she felt a certain attraction to him, rather like a bird mesmerized by a snake.
“Excellent. We’ll speculate together over dinner and a bottle of wine. Shall we say at the eighth hour this afternoon? I’ll send a car to pick you up.”
“Why… yes, that would be perfect.”
“Please do not concern yourself with the men I send with the transport. They are merely there to serve as your protection and nothing else. They will be at your service until you arrive here.” Anyone having two IMPSEC agents arriving at their front door had a right to be nervous. Hopefully his words would reassure her of the opposite.
After disconnecting, Markoff stood and strode back and forth across his office to work off the sudden rush of energy. She was far from being the most beautiful female on the planet, but to him, she had a certain appeal others didn’t. She was sharp, and above all, honest. Even knowing her life might be in danger should her answers to his questions be unsatisfactory, she’d answered truthfully, which was a rare thing these days. At no time had she hidden behind some half baked excuse for her failure to reconstruct the database, or find the location of the planet Earth. Few Var, and most certainly all Surl would have lied. It did surprise him that he’d asked her to dinner, something he’d never done before, but the reason eluded him. As the day progressed, he looked forward to the coming dinner with high degree of anticipation, and for once, didn’t have two incompetent, larcenous junior officers taken out and immediately shot. Instead, he’d drained their bank accounts, demoted them to private, and had had them shipped off as lowly guards to a penal mining colony. In retrospect, it might have been kinder in the long run to have had them shot, since working with Esterians would be hazardous to their health in several respects, sexual diversions being one of them. As usual, his private dining room was immaculate, and if the servants were surprised at having to lay out two places for dinner instead of the usual one, nothing showed on their blank faces. His implants kept him informed of the progress of the ground transportation, and the progress of the three individuals through the side entrance of the palace to the door of his living quarters. He rose as the door opened and in stepped Greta Bema.
“Good evening, Administrator Bema… may I call you Greta?” He asked as he took her evening cape.
“I… um… yes, please do Director Markoff.”
“Please, no titles tonight. Please call me Goff.”
“Err… yes, Goff.” She answered, a bit bewildered by the exchange of given names.
He held her chair out and she carefully sat, smoothing her one and only evening gown over her bottom as she sat. To her, the gown seemed cheap and out of place here in the palace, surrounded as she was by utter luxury. If he noticed, the Director said nothing, by look or word, and for that she was grateful. Taking his seat, a slave poured the wine, something straw colored and light, and he took a sip and nodded. Most of the wonderful meal was taken up with light talk about this and that, mostly forgotten the moment the words had faded away. After that, he led her to a small sitting room, at least by palace standards, where he poured a dark liquor into two thumb sized glasses before taking a seat opposite her.
“This drink is called Cognac, and was once produced on Earth. If for no other reason, I’d like to find Earth again so I can obtain more of it. Take care, it is very um… potent.” He smiled as Greta took a tiny sip. Her face lit up with surprise, and she coughed slightly.
“I can see why. It’s very… um… stimulating.”
“Good. Now to business,” Markoff smiled as he said this, just in case she misinterpreted his words, “your speculation on why a certain person would want to hide Earth for such as short period of time as five years.” Greta, sat back and began to relax, as her wild speculation as to the reason for this dinner vanished.
“I did check, and Earth’s years are about the same as ours, so there is no advantage there, correct?” She asked.
“Correct, and so?”
“It occurred to me that the only reason to erase the data is to gain time to do something.”
“Again, correct, but what something?”
“The records indicate that their military forces were decimated by imperial troops.”
“True, as were their offensive nuclear weapons, and pretty much anything else that could hurt us.”
“We smashed their cities flat, destroyed their manufacturing facilities, and left them with nothing to rebuild with.”
“Again, correct.” Markoff smiled to himself. She didn’t try to hide her words behind the fiction of manifest destiny, or benevolent imperial advancement. They’d invaded Earth and had smashed everything flat with the intention of turning it into another slave state.
“So what could they accomplish in five years?” Now she was challenging him with a question.
“To rebuild their army?”
Greta shook her head. “What good would that do them. We invaded and destroyed their military the first time. Unless they invent much better weapons, the same thing will happen again, and how many trained soldiers could you have in five years, starting from scratch?”
“Not very many, and they’d be green, raw recruits with no combat experience at all.”
“And, if they had no space based weapons or ships, there would be nothing stopping you from dropping hardened combat troops on the surface at any point and destroying them all over again.” Markoff nodded.
“So why go to all the trouble of infiltrating the Startography Institute and erasing the location of Earth?” She mused. “Is there some missing data I am not party to, Direc… Goff?”
“Yes, there is one thing that isn’t in any accessible database.”
With a casual flip of his wrist, he pointed his index finger to a screen on the wall to his right. The holo-screen flickered for 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.
“Your Imperial Startography Institute tells me that this planet is designated Sigma Alpha Prime, and no ship of any kind, dares get closer than one AU of this planet without being destroyed. That means it is pulled down as if caught in the gravity well of a black hole.” For a moment, Markoff had a feeling of déjà vu, as if he’d had the conversation before.
“I see.” Greta wasn't sure she did, but other than that, remained silent.
“You are something of an expert on planets. What are your observations about this one?” Greta looked at the data bar on the side, pursing her lips for a moment.
“Normally there is no way a planet of that mass could have a gravitational attraction of that magnitude, or anywhere near it for that matter. Yet, if you say this one can pull starships out of space, something else is going on.” Greta looked at the accompanying planetary system schematic, with the associated data beside each icon in the wall screen. It showed the planet's orbital path around its star, declination, mass and numerous additional details. The first odd thing she noted was that this planetary system consisted of nothing more than a white dwarf star and one planet. Very odd indeed. 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, again an oddity. It also showed that the planet wasn’t in the normal life bearing zone that far from the parent star. In fact, the planet shouldn't even have had liquid water, which it obviously did. The numbers showed that Sigma Alpha Prime massed about one and half times that of Telluria Prime with a correspondingly higher gravity but nothing near what it would take to pull a starship down. Then the Director remembered his conversation with General Tandy.
“One shuttle craft did manage to land, or I should say crash land, and within a few days the combat team made its way to this um… building.” The Director stopped, as the view dropped in to show the pyramid on the surface, and waited for her to make a comment.
“Holy Mother… is that building as large as this vid implies?”
“Yes it is. The vid is not doctored in any way.”
“Who could have built such as thing, and why?”
“That is one of the questions a lot of us would like to know the answer to as well.”
“And we need to land on the particular planet because?” The Director gave her a smile.
“Do you know what drives the Empire, Greta?” The Director asked in a soft voice, one perfectly shaped eyebrow raised slightly in question. Greta thought about it for a moment, discounting all the normal excuses for invading a planet. There had to be another reason to land here but she was at a loss to even frame the question.
“I have no idea.” She said at last.
“Our expansion into new, productive areas of the galaxy is strictly limited by the amount of Cg material we can collect, refine, and incorporate into the hulls of our starships. Without it, we would be nothing more than just another warring backwater planet, like so many others out there.”
“Yes, I can see that, even though I’m not familiar with that aspect of our technology.”
“But ask yourself what is the connection between Cg material and that.” As he spoke, the camera view changed and zoomed in to reveal the true size of the massive building so immense the tip protruded above the atmosphere into space.
“By the Holy Mother… it can’t be as big as this video shows… it’s… it’s impossible to build something that large.” Greta was stunned. Clearly this was a building, and not some natural occurrence. She noted that the sheer weight of the building had depressed the planet’s surface into a huge bowl-like depression.
“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 next surprise. “Yet our analysis of the probe data before they crashed tells me that building is composed entirely of Cg material.” Her surprise was evident, but Director Markoff wasn’t finished.
“If that wasn't sufficient inducement for us to expend valuable resources,” the Director continued, his attention more on the screen and the possibilities than his 'visitor'. “The whole planet appears to have substantial deposits scattered all over its surface.”
“I have to assume you endeavored to put people on the ground to um… disable this effect, assuming of course the mechanism is controlled from within that building.”
“Indeed I did, and we succeeded in putting a team on the ground,” Markoff pursed his lips in irritation, “however, my plan didn’t go as expected. Two of the team took control of that building and its secrets.”
“I see, and this would be the factor I was missing in my supposition.”
“Correct again. Somehow, this person by the name of Penn, by the way, managed to not only get off that accursed planet, but to get here in an impossibly short amount of time, and plant the virus.” Greta looked pensive for a moment.
“And that coincided with the attack on the Emperor himself.”
Markoff smiled to himself. Greta Bema was even sharper than he'd thought. “I’m delighted you put the facts together, and yes he did attack the Emperor, but it was a fake attack designed to pull the guards away from your building.”
“Of course, but why plant that particular virus, unless…”
“Yes. Unless what?” Greta sat back, sipping her Cognac, deep in thought for a short while.
“It means that he’s found some advanced technology inside that building and he needs time to develop it.” She said at last.
“Why advanced?”
“Even in my limited field of study, I know of no civilization that has the capacity to build something like that,” she nodded towards the screen showing the mountain sized pyramid, “therefore it was built by a very advanced race, one that is no longer here.”
“Again, your reasoning for this?” Suddenly she looked unsure of herself.
“Well…”
“Please. Don’t concern yourself with being politically correct, Greta.”
“Well… if, and I say if, such a civilization did exist we would have heard about it by now for one. Secondly, any civilization advanced enough to build that would probably stop our expansion across the galaxy, or tried to make a treaty with us.”
“Very good. There is also the point that any civilization that powerful would have no trouble defeating, one or all three of the competing Empires, singularly or all three at the same time, so why would they even bother seeking a treaty with any one of us?”
“That I hadn’t considered, but you are correct, they wouldn’t bother. If we proved an annoyance to them, they would have swept us aside. That being the case, they are no longer here.” She finished at last.
“Excellent reasoning, Greta. You would make an excellent intelligence administrator.” Greta blush under the compliment but shook her head.
“I’m sorry to say, Director, that there are some aspects of Imperial Intelligence work I wouldn’t be able to carry out—meaning no disrespect.” She added quickly. Markoff nodded.
“While in the service of the Emperor, and charged with his protection, it is an unceasing battle against those forces who seek to destroy him.”
“I understand, Director Markoff, I mean no disrespect to your office, or Imperial Security. You protect our beloved Emperor with your life…”
“Calm yourself, Greta, I mean no trick here to get you to say something untoward. This is merely a private conversation between… might I say friends?”
“I would be honored to be called your friend, Director.”
“Goff, please.”
“Yes, Goff.”
“Good. Now back to our suppositions. If he did find something inside that pyramid?” He asked, enjoying her company and her mind.
“Several things occurred to me. Even if he did get off that planet as you said, and back to this planet Earth, he would still be faced with the same problem as before. He’d need to construct a manufacturing base from scratch to build, or make this weapon. Assuming it is a weapon. He’d need to obtain the materials, organize some sort of mass production, and then train sufficient people to use it.”
