The Prize: Book One (21 page)

"Oh, God!!” she half screamed, gulping in fear, her heart pounding.

"Watch your step, Princess,” Penn's murmured in her ear in a shaky voice as he set her down.

"Where the frigging hell did that come from?  Damn it!  It wasn't there… it wasn't there a moment ago.”  Ellis leaned against a nearby wall, shaking like a leaf.

"I'm telling you, this city is a death trap," Dana put in.

"Shit.  What the hell do we do now?” She asked, looking around at the weathered gray faces of the buildings.  The windows looked back at her like empty eye sockets in a dead skull.

"We could try blowing our way through, Major.”

"To what?”  Captain Carras snapped before Ellis could answer.  ”We have no idea what's on the other side of those buildings.”

"More building, I'm sure,” Penn commented.

"That's crazy!  You need roads, or alleyways for people to get in and out.”

"The operative word there are people.  How do we know the beings that built this place were people?  We don't know anything about whoever built these buildings.  For all we know, maybe they were birds?”  Penn answered, looking up at the tops of the buildings.

It didn't actually make much sense, but it did make them stop and think.  In the end, Ellis called a halt to the march, still a little shaken from her near dead encounter.  It was getting late anyway, so she ordered Captain Carras and Sergeant Jaxx to set up camp.  The troopers weren't happy, but wandering around in the dark had even less appeal.

"Still worried about getting to the pyramid before the others?”  Penn asked as Ellis sat down beside him with a plate of food.

"At this rate, we'll never get there.  By the way, thanks for saving my life.”

"You're welcome, Princess.”  Other than giving him a look, she said nothing about his form of address.

"You think whoever built this place designed it so that no one could get to the pyramid?"

"If it were true, and you could only walk to the pyramid, and couldn't use any high-tech equipment, it would be a formidable defense.  But no, I think there is something else at work here.”

"You said earlier, when the Silurian's went down that pit, or whatever that it wasn't your fear.  What did you mean?"

"Oh, nothing, just a silly idea.”

Ellis pressed him further, but Penn just shrugged her off.  Instead, he told her a joke, the one about the guy on the desert island with the supermodel, and bragging rights.  Ellis laughed despite herself, even though she'd heard it before.  The rest of the troops thought it was funny as it was one of those jokes that transferred from one culture to another.  Still, Ellis knew something else was going on inside that oh so handsome head of his but she was too tired to try and find out.  The next morning, and another forced march under the blazing sun, they turned a corner, and at last came in sight of the doorway leading into the pyramid.

"Thank God for that."  Ellis murmured.

CHAPTER - NINETEEN:              The Nightmare begins  

Thankful to have come to the end of their wanderings, the entrance into the pyramid no more than a quarter of a mile away.  But like everything else so far, even that wasn't going to be easy as someone started shooting.  They ducked for cover without casualties as cyan pulsar bolts flew by, but didn't have time to return fire.  Either way, they didn't have much to fire at, as whoever was shooting ducked out of sight behind a large ornate fountain outside the entry portal.

"Damn!”  Ellis muttered.”  Just what I needed, another freaking holdup!"

"Maybe better out here than inside.”  Penn sighed, settling behind a wall.

"I don't see how.”

"We have no idea what we face inside that building, or why our shooting partner hasn't gone inside as well.”

"It's just a rear guard, to slow us down?"

"Could be,” Penn said, not convinced.  As he spoke, somewhere behind and above them, the big 60 Cal boomed, and they saw a large chunk of the fountain vanish in a cloud of dust and flying fragments.  A second shot boomed out a moment later, and someone flip backward into view from behind the fountain.

"That's one sucker down, Major," Trooper Class called.  Despite his bulk, Class had somehow managed to worm his way back unseen, and found himself a high point from which to shoot.  The first Thrakee lost his head in a long spray of bright red blood and gray brain matter that smeared itself across the white stone behind him.

"Hurrah!  Good, keep it up Class, if you can," Ellis answered.

"Will do, Ma'am.” 

The 60 Cal boomed again, and a second Thrakee flipped backward into view, dead before he knew it.  The second shot passed through the stonework of the fountain and simply blew it, and the Thrakee behind it, into big ugly chunks.  An arm, his head, and part of his chest went one way while his rest of his torso went the other.  The resulting mess stark and gruesome against the beautiful golden backdrop of the alien pyramid.  A quick scan with a thermal detector showed the plaza in front of the pyramid clear of any other life signs.  But even so, at Ellis's command, they moved cautiously out of cover.  The troopers used doors and walls to cover their advance down the street, spreading out as they entered the last plaza in front of the pyramid.  Their eyes searching every shadow.  Taking up a position by the fountain, Penn and Ellis covered the center.

“That's seven,” Penn noted.

“Seven?”

“Five in the pit back there, and these two in the courtyard make seven.”

“So?”

“I counted fifteen back at their camp, so that leaves eight.”  Ellis shook her head.

“Trust you to keep count.”

“You never know when information will come in handy, Major.”  Ellis shot him another quick look as she slowly got to her feet.

"Well, so much for the rear guard.”  Ellis kept her weapon aimed toward the entrance.  She motioned her men forward, expecting Penn to take the lead, but instead, he moved over beside her, carefully stepping over the blood and brains.

"Now it's going to get interesting,” Penn mused.  His yellow eyes looked troubled.  His gut feeling was that no matter how rough the path was to get here, it was just a prelude to the main event.  Keeping her main attention on the portal, she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, noting the look on Penn's face.

"More traps?”  Ellis asked.

"Not in the way you think.”  Penn pursed his lips for a moment, considering her question.  He wanted to reassure her, but couldn't think of anything to say that would.

Under Captain Carras and Sergeant Jaxx's direction, the troops formed a line and performed a classic entry maneuver.  Ellis and Penn walked backward to the entrance, keeping their eyes to the rear.  As they moved, they both heard the calls of 'CLEAR!'  'CLEAR!'  CLEAR!  As the troopers swept the inside of the portal for enemies.

"Damn!”  Ellis spat in frustration.  ”I was hoping we'd catch them before they moved out.”  Ellis swore again.  ”They'll probably get the prize before we do at this rate.”  Penn looked up at the pyramid towering above them and shook his head. 

”I'm betting it's up there.  In which case, they, and we, have a long way to go.”

“This isn't a building, it's a bloody mountain!” she muttered, shaking her head as she looked up.  ”Hell, mountains don't usually poke into space.”

"Let's hope they installed an elevator," Penn quipped.

"Yeah, right!”  Ellis shot back as she followed her troopers into the pyramid.

Penn ran his hand over the smooth vertical wall of the base.  The edges of the pyramid didn't go all the way to the ground as he first surmised, but ended some twenty-five feet above their heads at the top of a vertical wall.  The stonework by the doorway felt as smooth as silk, not grainy like stone.  Penn looked closer, contracting his irises to pin points so he could examine the grain of the material.  Instead of grains of rock, he saw thousands upon thousands of tightly packed points of light.  Penn whistled in surprise.  The whole of the outer surface of the pyramid was nothing more than a enormous solar collector.  Trillions of light gathering receptors soaked up every bit of available sunlight.  He tried to work out the amount of energy the building was collecting per hours, but without a calculator, it was nothing more than an estimate.  The total surface area was immense, and depending on the transfer efficiency of the material used for the solar energy cells, this structure was collecting somewhere in the order of several thousand terawatts of power.  What did it do with that much power he wondered?  Every sense in his body told him to run, to get away from this building as fast, and as far as he possible.  This was a no-win situation, no matter which way he looked at it.  For a moment, he looked at Sub Major Ellis standing in the doorway and let out a long sigh, catching her lilac sent on the air.  Shaking his head in disbelief at what he was about to do, and with one last look up at the pyramid, he followed her into the building.

Much to his surprise, he found that just beyond the doorway, the room festooned with thin, brownish looking vines, or roots hanging from an unseen ceiling.  Many had long, soft pinkish tubers, or seedpods of some kind dangling from some of the thicker vines.  He couldn't see more than two feet in any direction through the densely pack mass, but looking up; he could see light peeked through the gaps in the roots.  It was impossible to determine the source of the light, it was just there.  Ellis looked angry as a sound, just on the edge of her hearing kept buzzed in her ear, grating on her nerves.  The noise was not quite musical, just a deep resonating, disconcerting tone that didn't quite register, giving the place an eerie, otherworldly feel.  Like a misty rain shower, fresh water sprayed from the tangled root mass overhead, instantly soaking them to the skin.  The water was a relief after the scorching heat outside, and for a moment, Ellis closed her eyes and enjoyed the sensation. 

A curtain of cobweb like material threaded its way between the tangled root mass, and for a moment Ellis felt as if she'd just stepped back into the dark, dank, jungle again, instead of the ground floor of some mountain size building.  She wondered idly what sort of animal, or insect made the cobwebs, shivering at the thought of spiders.  She hated spiders, even the little ones.  The cobwebs seemed totally out of place somehow, and it took her a moment to take it all in.  If she didn't know better, she would have sworn they were the first to enter the building in a millennium.  It was impossible to tell if the Thrakee or the Silurians had passed this way, or which way they might have gone as none of the cobweb sheets showed any damaged.  As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she looked around for her men, finding them bunched up just inside the doorway as if seeking mutual support.  Their weapons waved back and forth, looking for enemies in the wet, tangled mass.  Penn, by contrast, was near the sunlit doorway collecting water in a canteen from a bunch of vine he'd braided together.  He'd set up another canteen to test the water for toxins.  She smiled to herself.  Penn would think of basic survival first.  It made sense as they were almost out of water with no way of telling how soon they'd find anything suitable to drink.

"Is it good?”  She asked, her eyes scanning the semi-darkness around her.

"So far it's clean, but I was hoping for a vintage 67 Château Montelena.”  He quipped, looked up at her, his eyes full of laughter.

"Dream on, Penn,"

"There's no harm in dreaming."  He took a long swig from the canteen, and choked for a moment as if swallowing too fast, and looked at the canteen in surprise.

"What's wrong?”  Ellis asked, seeing his reaction, her eyes flicking back and forth in search of an enemy.

"Err... nothing... it's just...”  He laughed and shook his head.  ”No, nothing.  Just cool clean water is all.”  Ellis nodded and continued her survey.  Seeing Penn testing and drinking the water reminded her of her priorities.

“Captain, have two men follow Penn's example and fill the camel packs before we move out.”