The Imperative Chronicles, Books One and Two: The Mars Imperative & The Tesserene Imperative

by Mark Terence Chapman

  “Place of Wonder,” Guido repeated. “That could be interesting. Computer, what else can you tell us about Tral?”

  “Tral is shrouded in thick clouds year round. Several mountain ranges have high peaks that pierce the cloud cover. Otherwise, little sunlight penetrates, leaving the surface in perpetual twilight. Much of the surface consists of marshland. Most of the former population lived on half of one continent near the south polar region. The average annual temperature there is approximately nine degrees on your Celsius scale.”

  “Cold and wet,” Tom interrupted. “It doesn’t sound all that wonderful to me. Computer, do you know why the Krewl-tí refer to it as the Place of Wonder?”

  “Indeed. They believe that the secrets of the universe are contained there.”

  “That’s a pretty good reason,” Tom confirmed with eyebrows raised. “Do you know where on the planet they believe those secrets are kept?”

  “There is a structure on the southern continent that they believe is the source of all knowledge. They call it the Seat of Power.”

  “Is it something we could visit?” Guido asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Show us how to get there from here,” Cap ordered.

  Instantly, the route map appeared overhead with two purple junctions and one pink one illuminated.

  “It looks like we have one hub between here and Tral. But how do we find the site once we get there?” I wondered. The computer apparently took that last question as a request, because the route map was replaced with a detailed image of a globe that presumably represented Tral. On the globe were a pink dot and a blue one.

  “A blue portal?” Guido asked. “What’s that one for?”

  “We know that purple ones are major hubs and pink ones link planets to hubs or other planets,” Sparks contributed. “It seems logical that they would have portals from point to point on a planet. It looks like the blue ones are the dirt-side ones, connecting various points on the planet to the terminals containing the pink portals.”

  “Computer,” I asked. “How far is the blue portal from the structure the Krewl-tí call the Seat of Power?

  “One point three kilometers.”

  “Well, we certainly can walk to it without any difficulty,” Cap pointed out. “Is that where everyone wants to go?”

  We all nodded vigorously. After all, how often do mere mortals get to see where The Secrets of the Universe are stored?

  “Right, then. Computer, please show us the portal to Tral.”

  A purple portal lit up behind Cap, and we all headed toward it, closing our faceplates as we walked, just in case.

  CHAPTER 19

  The hub we passed through on the way to Tral sat atop a plateau. It was impossible to tell whether it was so high up that we were looking down on clouds, or if it simply was a hilltop surrounded by a pea soup fog. Either way, there was nothing to see but mossy rock, a faintly violet-colored sky, and a glorious sunset that made the clouds glisten. We saw no reason to dawdle. After all, what was a mere planet never before seen by human eyes compared to the Seat of Power? We stepped through the pink portal the computer displayed for us and arrived in…darkness.

  Guido cried out, “Hey, who turned out the lights?”

  “I don’t think there are any lights here to turn off,” I countered. “It isn’t so much that it’s pitch dark here as it is that our faceplates are still darkened from the last stop.” Even as I spoke, the self-tinting faceplates began to lighten in response to the much dimmer ambient light.

  “Whoa.” Tom was looking up at the gravid charcoal-gray clouds hanging low overhead. “The computer wasn’t kidding about the lack of sunlight down here.”

  We stood inside the terminal looking through the transparent walls. At least the drizzle couldn’t reach us.

  “Computer,” Cap requested, “please open the portal to the Seat of Power.”

  A blue portal illuminated on our right. We stepped through and arrived in a similarly dim, but far smaller, terminal.

  “This must be the place. Computer, which way to the Seat of Power from here?” Cap asked.

  “With your backs to the portal, it is straight ahead.”

  “Thank you. Where is the door out of here?” A white portal began shimmering in front of us, and we used it to take our first steps on the surface of Tral.

  After less than a hundred meters, we came to a dead stop.

  “‘Well, we can certainly walk to it without any difficulty.’” Sparks did a fair impression of Cap’s British inflection. “Famous last words.”

  For once I couldn’t fault Sparks’ sarcasm. Cap shrugged with an abashed grin on his face. Before us, slightly more than a kilometer away lay a magnificent gleaming white edifice that seemed to defy the gloom. It could only be the Seat of Power.

  I couldn’t tell how tall it was, because it quickly disappeared into the low-hanging clouds, but what I saw of it was immense. Of course, to reach it, we merely had to leap across the canyon that separated us. It was nearly a kilometer across, and more than that in depth.

  “How are we going to cross that?” Guido asked. He looked over the edge and then backed away quickly.

  “I’d like to know why the computer didn’t tell us about this canyon,” Tom wondered.

  “Pure speculation on my part,” I said, “but I’d guess that this canyon didn’t exist when the portal was created. A lot of geological changes can take place in two billion years, after all.”

  “But why wouldn’t someone have updated the computer to tell it about the canyon in all this time?” Tom countered.

  “And why hasn’t anyone built a bridge across it by now?” Guido asked.

  “Hey, I don’t know any more than you do,” I shot back. “Maybe this is religious ground and it would be sacrilege to deface the canyon with a bridge, or maybe it’s considered doing penance to have to go the long way around. Or maybe there was a bridge and someone destroyed it. Who knows? Either way, it looks like we’re walking.”

  Sparks had been silent thus far because he was busy scanning the area. “We can save our suit air. Not surprisingly, the atmosphere here is suitable for humans.” We all opened our faceplates as he continued reporting. “It looks like the shorter route around the canyon is to our right. It’s still a good six klicks, but it would be over fifty if we went the other way.”

  “Right it is, then,” Cap declared. “Let’s go.”

  “We’re off to see the w—” Sparks began singing.

  “Don’t start that again!” Cap interrupted. “If we see another yellow brick road, I swear to God I’ll put you out the airlock myself when we get back to the ship!”

  We all laughed at the thought, even Sparks.

  * * * *

  Between the suits, the slightly higher than Earth-normal gravity, and the mushy ground—there was no pavement anywhere in sight—those six kilometers took us more than three hours to trudge through.

  “Why do you suppose the Progenitors, as advanced as they were, didn’t have some sort of weather control to make this place more pleasant?” Tom asked.

  “Maybe it was beyond their abilities,” Guido suggested.

  “Or, maybe,” Cap said, “the equipment broke down millions of years ago and no one knows how to fix it.”

  “Or, maybe they like it like this,” Sparks stated. “After all, we really don’t know much about the Progenitors.”

  “Or, maybe the planet wasn’t like this two billion years ago.” That was my conclusion, anyway.

  By the time we arrived at the entrance to the structure, we were exhausted and damp. The suits kept most of the rain out, but some managed to sneak in through the open faceplates and run down our faces and necks, onto our clothes beneath. We walked up the steps into the entryway.

  “Can I make a suggestion?” Guido offered. “We’re in a breathable atmosphere, I presume there’s no dangerous radiation around, and we’re about to go inside a big building. Can we dump these suits? I’d like to feel the fresh
air on my skin just once. We’ve been cooped up in these damn things for weeks!”

  “I second that!” Tom blurted out.

  “Hear, hear,” I contributed.

  Cap looked at Sparks. “Do you detect anything we should be concerned about?”

  Sparks took another look at his sensor pad. “Nope. As far as I can tell, it’s safe to walk around naked.”

  “Let’s not go that far,” Guido quipped.

  “Very good.” Cap said, wisely ignoring Guido. “All right chaps, have at it.”

  We stripped off the suits in record time. In less than a minute we all stood there in skintights and moccasins. We would have been chilly in the cool weather, except that our body-hugging skintights were thermally self-regulating, keeping us comfortable at a wide range of temperature extremes. As long as we kept them on, the ambient temperature wouldn’t be much of a problem. Of course, the skintights didn’t do much for our hands and faces.

  “Phew!” Sparks remarked with distaste. “Maybe we should have kept the suits on after all! We reek like we haven’t showered since we left Earth. I just hope we don’t run into any alien babes with sensitive noses. We could start an interstellar incident!”

  He wasn’t exaggerating—we were ripe! That’s the downside of living inside an EVA suit for weeks at a time. Even with daily showers, all suits eventually acquire an odor that’s difficult to eliminate. And the temporary water shortage aboard Shamu, when we couldn’t shower at all, hadn’t helped. It was going to take a proper repair-and-refit visit at ODF Odyssey to make the suits habitable again.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a twenty-minute hot shower!” Guido said, longingly.

  Cap had a twinkle in his eye. “All right you stinkers,” as if he smelled any better than we did, “let’s stop jawing in the entryway and go inside.”

  That caused us to take a better look at where we were. The building was made of a bright white substance that looked like marble, but according to Sparks, it wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t made of anything the sensors recognized.

  “Is it natural or man-made? Make that ‘constructed,’” Cap amended.

  “The sensors can’t make heads or tails of it, so it could be either, but my guess is it’s artificial. It looks too regular for stone, but I can’t be absolutely certain.”

  We stood in the entryway. Behind us, it lay open to the environment. Before us and to the sides were high featureless walls meeting in a similarly undistinguished flat ceiling, twenty-plus meters above us.

  “This would make a great handball court,” Tom decided, “if it weren’t for the doorway in the other end.”

  Said doorway appeared to be the only way into the building—at least the only way visible from where we were.

  “We’re not going to learn anything more standing out here,” Sparks remarked. “We might as well go in.”

  We entered the surprisingly narrow doorway single file and continued walking. There was nothing to see for several minutes but bare marble-like walls, until we reached the point where the hallway opened into a vast interior space. I hesitate to call it a room because of its size. Small aircars could have taken off and landed there. As we looked around, it was clear that there was nothing else to see but the object before us, located toward the back of the chamber.

  Sparks was busy scanning the premises. “I’m not picking up anything but what we see. Stone walls and a stone…whatever-that-is.”

  Indeed, it was difficult to put a name on the object before us. It looked vaguely like a bench on a dais with a small angled table before it. Both seemed to be made out of the same material as the building itself. The table was almost like a tiny drafting table, but only about a third of a meter square. Still, it wasn’t like any table we’d ever seen before. That is, it looked perfectly ordinary when viewed directly, but out of the corner of one’s eyes, it seemed to…twitch. I don’t know how else to say it, but it just wasn’t right, somehow. It was as if it was slightly out of phase with reality, if that makes any sense.

  “Are you sure you aren’t picking up any energy traces coming from that dais?” Cap inquired. “That can’t be normal.” Apparently he saw the oddness too.

  “Nothing. As far as my sensors are concerned, that bench-and-table thing is as inert as the rest of the stone around us.”

  “Are you sure the sensors are working?” Cap asked, pressing the issue.

  “Hey, I can pick up your heartbeat and respiration. I can tell you your electrolyte levels. I can pick up animal life outside the building. I just can’t pick up any trace of energy from this thing. Remember the dome? Same thing there.”

  “Some ‘Seat of Power.’” Guido shrugged. “I guess they meant it figuratively.”

  You know,” Tom began, “I’m struck by the lack of ornamentation or furniture or anything in the hubs and other Progenitors’ places we’ve visited. Were they that spartan in their lifestyles, or has everything been removed since they left?”

  “I’m sure they took a lot with them when they fled the Hruk,” I replied. “But the looters have had over a billion years to snatch anything that wasn’t nailed down, and probably most of what was.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Tom conceded. “I guess this bench wasn’t worth stealing.”

  Because it was the only thing in the room besides us, we took a closer look. Viewed from the bench, it was apparent that there were two depression on the surface of the “table” that weren’t visible from the back.

  “It almost looks like people have worn down the stone by rubbing their palms here and here,” Sparks said. He sat on the bench and placed his hands, palm down in the hollows in the stone.

  “Assuming they have palms,” Guido countered, “or even hands, instead of tentacles.”

  As Sparks slid his hands around in the hollows, he suddenly stopped for a moment. “Did you see that?” he shouted. “Did you feel it?”

  “See what?” Cap asked. “Feel what?”

  “You didn’t—? I…it— I don’t know how to describe what happened. It was like…for a split second I saw it all. I felt like I knew everything there is to know. And then, it was…gone,” he said wistfully. “I don’t remember any of it. It’s like waking from a dream where you can’t quite remember what it was about, but you knew it was good. Damn! This thing would be incredible if we can just figure out how to use it. It was like having the entire portal computer inside my head, but without the computer.”

  “Hmm,” Cap mused. “Maybe the Krewl-tí weren’t as addled as we thought when they called this the Seat of Power. Anyone who could figure out how to use it would certainly hold a lot of power in his hands.”

  “Assuming it wasn’t just a hallucination,” Guido said.

  “Fine. You try it,” Sparks growled.

  “Glad to. What did you do, exactly?”

  “I’m not sure. I just put my hands in these dimples and slid them around looking for, I don’t know, the “right” spot. It just happened suddenly and boom, there it was. But it felt like my hands weren’t quite the right fit for the controls, somehow.”

  They changed places and Guido tried. He’s a bit shorter than Sparks and had to lean forward to reach the “control panel,” if that’s what it was. He attempted to duplicate Spark’s motions. After a minute or two, Guido shrugged. “Nothing. Just a bit of heat on my palms from friction.”

  “I know it wasn’t my imagination. Maybe only certain people can work the controls, or maybe you’re too short to reach correctly, or your hands are too small. I think I bridged a gap momentarily, but my hands weren’t big enough to keep in contact. Swede, your hands are bigger than mine. Why don’t you try it?”

  Everyone stared at me, waiting. Aboard ship I was always hitting my head on things because I’m too tall, and tripping over things because my feet are too big. Maybe for once in this mission my size would be good for something.

  As Guido had done a moment before, I shrugged. “Sure, why not.”

  Guido made way for me and
I sat. Surprisingly, the stone felt comfortable—not unyielding, as I’d expected. I reached forward and placed my hands in the depressions. Nothing happened, so I moved them around a bit. Still nothing—then my right hand stuck in one spot as if glued there and a moment later so did the other. I couldn’t move a muscle. I was locked in place. Then my head burst open.

  This was different from the pain of the starlight in the hub. My mind was being ripped apart and reassembled. At first there was nothing but starbursts and splashes of color. Nothing recognizable. Then the colors began to coalesce into vague shapes, and finally I seemed to be rushing down a corridor with an endless number of open doors. I could go through any of them and learn whatever I needed—things that I hadn’t understood before were suddenly crystal clear. I greedily opened one door after another.

  * * * *

  Sometime later, I opened my eyes, to find that the chamber was pitch dark, lit only by the handheld lights of my crewmates. They rushed over to me when they saw me turn my head.

  “My God, what happened to you?” Cap asked in alarm.

  “You were frozen like that for two days!” Tom said.

  “We only knew you were alive by the sensor readings,” Sparks added.

  “Thank goodness you’re all right,” Guido said with a worried look on his face. “What happened?”

  “I understand now,” I croaked, my throat parched. “Water please.”

  Guido handed me a water bladder taken from one of the suits.

  I nodded my thanks and swallowed half of the contents before proceeding. “Drelx was wrong. The Progenitors never left.”

  “What do you mean they never left?” demanded Tom.

  “The Progenitors knew they were defeated,” I began. “They knew they couldn’t stay in this galaxy or they’d be hunted down and exterminated by the Hruk. They had to leave. So they gathered as many of their belongings as they could and fled the galaxy en masse for parts unknown. Only they didn’t all leave at once. In fact, in a sense they never left at all. Or rather, the Progenitors tried to leave, but the Hruk utterly destroyed them.”