The Prize: Book One (43 page)

“Find them and kill them,” he murmured in a low voice, feeling a cold shiver run up his spine. 

“Yes, your Majesty.”  Director Markoff wasn't fooled by the soft words, and wondered if he should be seeking a way to escape as well.

Just then, the emergency power came on, and he could see the carnage below.  This time he knew Penn wouldn't stop, and he'd have to kill him.  Penn was warned what would happen if this day ever arrived, and he'd just condemned the rest of the human race to death.  The Emperor momentarily blanked the rear part of the shield, and with guard in front and behind, Director Markoff quickly returned to his office.  Once there, he activated his own defense shield, and tried to follow Penn's progress through the Palace with the internal Security cams.  The blur of motion about the Palace, and the on-going firefight had to be Penn, and that traitorous Major Ellis who he now realized was the stunningly beautiful woman beside Penn.  He very much doubted they'd gone far; knowing Penn, he was looking for another way to get to the Emperor.  Not that it would do him any good.  The personal shield the Emperor carried, would stop everything, up to and including a nuclear explosion.  The question was.  Did he have the means, or was he just searching in the hopes of discovering some way to turn off the force shield around the throne?  A pointless exercise as the shield generator was inside the shield.  Either way it didn't matter, they were trapped now all the outer blast doors were closed.  He quickly sent out orders to pull more troops into the search, and ring the Palace before they found a way to escape.  He worked the mental controls faster and faster in an attempt to catch up with the speeding shadow, cursing softly, unable to understand what Penn was doing, or where he and the Sub Major was going.  After a while, all he could do was sit back and wait, coordinating the Security forces as they poured in and begin the room-to-room search.  He then started to wonder how Penn and the Major got here at all.  They should be trapped on a Sigma Alpha Prime.  If they managed to turn the gravity effect off, it was impossible for them to get here since they crashed onto the surface.  He discounted the possibility that they weren't even on the shuttle, he'd seen the video of them loading.  Even with the flashest ship available, there was no way they could reach Telluria Prime for another 30 day cycle, and why was there still no word from General Tandy, or Captain Melche?

CHAPTER - FORTY THREE:              Reckoning

“Ready here.”  Ellis announced, gathered up the last of the frightened slaves and shepherding them into the common area of the slave quarters.

“Yes Major Ellis.  Transporting you all now.”

In a moment, the back room in the slave quarters vanished, replaced in less than a blink of an eye by the large open area inside the antique ship.  Behind them in the same room they’d just left came a clattering sound over the pop of displaced air of the slave collar and bracelets hitting the cold stone floor.  It took a few moments for Ellis to calm them down, but in the end, they all understood they were now free.  As arranged earlier, the non-human slave soon departed.  Wiser, fed, clothes and provided with Imperial credits they returned to their home worlds, and hopefully a new life.  The handful of human slave stood, or sat around the room, watching, round eyed at this strange commanding female who seemed too magically appear and disappeared at will.  In the Palace behind her, confusion reign as Penn provoked the guard units into firing at him.

“I think it time to make like the good shepherd and get the flock out of here.”  He panted, discovering he'd turned down a dead end hallway.

“Yes, Sir.”  Penn shot past a surprised Ellis in the control room as he appeared, coming to a skidding half before crashing into the control consult.  An errant plasma bolt dissipated in the air over his head. 

“Wow!  That was fun.”  He laughed.  Ellis just sniffed and gave him the 'look' of 'boys will be boys while the women do all the work'.

“Hey!”  What's with the look?  I took the chance of getting my butt shot off while you were safely wandering around collecting lost waifs.”  He said in his defense.

“Did I say anything?”  Ellis asked innocently.

“Humm…”  Penn cocked an eyebrow at her before turn to the consult.  “Looks like we drew off all the troops as expected.”

“They might still have a few guards wandering about inside the Startography Institute.”

“Nothing we can't handle.”

“True, but we want to do this as quickly, and as quietly as possible.”

“I'd say we have about thirty minutes until all the courier ships and drones get underway.  We need to give them time to upload their nav data before we erase it.”

“That should give us plenty of time to sneak in there and get to the main data access interface at the core.”

“Which one is going to Earth, Richard?”  He smiled over at her.

“The first one of course, and by the way,” he said off-handedly, “you'll never guess what I found in Markoff's data base.”

“Richard!”  She snapped, giving him her narrowed eyed look.  She wasn’t in the mood to plat guessing games with him right now, and her said as much.

“Alright, already.  I found a list of all humans who joined the Empire military, the ones still alive that is.”

“Wow.  How many?”

“Several thousand, but I didn't have time to count them all.”

“And?”

“I sent out sealed orders under Markoff's signature to have them all transferred to a little out of the way planet Michael was kind enough to find for me.”

Silence greeted his revelation, and looking over his shoulder, Penn saw the look on Ellis's face.  The look said she obviously wasn't in the mood to play his usual ‘guess what I know’ games.  Penn let out an audible sigh.  Sometimes she was no fun at all.

“If I know Markoff, one of the first things he is going to do is order the execution of all humans in the Empire military, besides ordering the destruction of Earth.”

“You're right, he will.  Now he can't, but what do we do with them?”

“The sealed order said to drop them off on a particular planet and leave.”

“So what does that get us?”

“What Mr. Penn is trying to tell you is, that the planet still has a working portal connected to the planet you call Alpha Sigma Prime.”

“Well I'll be…  Jesus!  That means well have several thousand human troops wandering around there tearing up the place.”

“Not to worry, they will be safely tucked away inside the pyramid.”

“So what do we do with them?”

“Isn't that obvious?  We remove the implant devices and show them the light, so to speak.”  Ellis looked dubious.

“You don't really expect them to change sides at the drop of a hat, do you?”

“No, but once we explain the situation, I think they will come round.”  A smile pulled at the corner of Ellis's mouth and she nodded in understanding.

Getting into, and erasing the startograph database was something of an anticlimax.  The remaining guard stood around outside the front entrance watching the on-going fight fire around the Palace.

“Ellis,” Penn whispered as the stood in the shadows, “they are still at it.”

“I can see that, but good grief, we left an hour ago.” Ellis chuckled softly.

“The troops have no idea who they were firing at, each other probably.”

With the main power to this part of the city still out, and with just the emergency lighting to provide spotty illumination, it was easy to move from shadow to shadow, not as it turned they needed to.  Penn felt a certain satisfaction as he downloaded the erasure program into the core of the computer.  It would ferret out all current data to Earth's location, and any backup copies related to that region of space.  As an added precaution, imbedded, in the 'handshake' protocol between incoming, and outgoing starship, or drone, navigation systems, was a secondary program to erase the same information from any inbound ships.  By standing order, all ships connected with the Startograph Institute the moment they arrived, and downloaded their voyage nav data.  This information updated the central navigation systems for any changes, or new anomalies they had encountered in their travels.  As a precaution, Penn added a subroutine to the outbound message drone to Earth, to download the same erasure program to all nav beacons along its flight path.  This would propagate outward with ships, and message drones, to other nav beacons going elsewhere in the Empire.  Now the Empire would have a great big hole in its star data, much as it did for anything beyond its frontiers.  How long it would take to explore, and refill that hole was unknown.  Penn was betting at least five to ten years before Earth could expect a revisit from the Empire.  Any longer than that was just a bonus.  Hopefully they could put together a respectable force to meet that eventuality.

                                              *  *  *  *  *  *

For Director Markoff, an hour passed with nothing more than sporadic report of sighting, or the occasional firefight, but no confirmed reports of anyone actually seeing either of them.  By then, the Palace complex was ringed with troops, with heavily armed parties searching every nook and cranny of the Palace to no avail.  The Director looked around his office in frustration as he tried to understand what Penn was up to.  He could not get to the Emperor behind his defense shield, nor could he get to him for that matter.  Or could he?  That thought made the Director look around his office to make sure Penn wasn't hiding in a corner waiting for the right moment to strike.  He then noticed the statues.  They'd all been rearranged.  He felt an icy cold finger of fear worming its way up his back.  Penn had been in his office, but why come here?  For a moment, he concentrated his mind on bringing up the one file he hadn't looked at yet, the video of his office.  In shock, he watched Penn enter and sit in this very seat, completely bypassing his Security system.  He placed what looked like a block of crystal on the interface port on his desk, and Markoff let out a snort.  No way was Penn going to get into his computers.  The database was protected by a one hundred and fifty bit encryption code keys to his brain.  The blood drained from his face as the wall screen came to life, becoming a blur as Penn scrolled thought his private files.  A last the blur stopped, and it took a moment for him to realize what Penn was doing.

“Holy mother…”  He watched as an order to withdraw all troops from every occupied planet scrolled up the screen.  ”Nooo…” he moaned.  A perfect reproduction of his, and the Emperor's physical and mental signature attached itself to the order before the screen cleared and Penn sent the directive on its way.

“Damn you to hell Penn!”  Shunting through his outbox he tried to retrieve the message, but it was too late.

A dozen courier ships had already departed, and a hundred more message drones had already left the system.  Chaos loomed in his mind as he mentally jumped back into his system.  He needed to send a countermanding order to stop any withdrawal, but instead of finding the right file, he ran into a black wall.  It wasn't there.  Director Markoff looked at his empty screen for a moment in blank astonishment until a horrible thought occurred to him.  With a thought he tried to bring up General Tandy's file, instead receiving a 'no such file exists'.  He tried another and another before trying to pull up the main Directory.  There was nothing there.  All data banks were wiped clean.

“Damn you to hell Penn!”  Now he knew what Penn was doing in the Palace.

The supposed attack on the Emperor was nothing but a diversion, giving him time for the courier ships, and the message drones to leave the system.  Without a database, it would take even more time for him to create and send new orders countermanding the last ones.  By then chaos would ensue.  He had no illusions about this Empire.  The moment the iron fist of the Imperial army and navy were removed, there would be open rebellion, and the Holy Mother knew how long it would take to put them all down, and restore order.  In the end he flipped back to the vid of Penn sitting in his chair, but there was little to see after that, except Penn standing, and looking directly at the video pickup.  He smiled and waved, knowing all this time it was there.  Another hour passed with no sign of Penn or Ellis, and no more firefights or reports of sightings.  Markoff looked at his crono.  By this time, most, if not all the courier ships and message drones had climbed out of the systems gravity well and translated into hyperspace.  Somehow, he knew it was over, and that the two humans had escaped.  The question of how they got here in the first place remained unanswered.  In the end, he called off alert, and sent the troops back to their barracks.  Now he'd have to clean up this mess, and explain this to the Emperor.