ADMIRAL BAINBRIDGE

Harris had been left in a large office filled with expensive furniture, there were two star charts filling one of the walls. Harris sat in a comfortable armchair near the large window which formed the entire wall opposite the star charts. The chair was one of those rotating type and Harris had to resist the temptation to spin round fast and go weeeeee. Admiral Bainbridge had gone into an outer office to give some papers to a secretary, so Harris had been left on his own for a while making the temptation to go weeeeee almost irresistible.

The Admiral came back into the room and sat in one of the other whizzy chairs near the window. He was in his shirt sleeves and in the morning sunlight looked like a very kindly old uncle, possibly in his early sixties.

"If I was you I would be shouting and screaming protests at being dragged half way across the galaxy without any by your leave or explanation what so ever. " said the Admiral. "But you are not me which is why you have been selected for what could be one of the most important missions ever undertaken by the Eastern Federation. You must have guessed that this was important when you were taken into the General Security Council meeting, but what you will not know is the political background to what we are proposing. " The Admiral paused.

"You have a very good reputation in the Archive Directorate as someone with their finger on the pulse of history. The reports in your personnel file also tell me you have a sharp mind and are not flustered by odd or strange situations and that you have a broad knowledge of things. I am afraid at Central Command here we have too many specialists, very good men but face them with a situation outside there particular field of study and they are lost." The Admiral who had been looking out the window while he was talking swung his chair round to look at Harris. "Your academy reports say you are good at solving and fixing problems and last but not least you have the Imperial Medal. That is what is in your file, however, I am sure you of all people undoubtedly know, what is in a file is not necessarily correct, so I have to ask if you concur with that assessment of yourself. "

Harris thought for a moment before speaking. " I think I would have to admiral, which is why I suppose I am in central archives rather than the ranger squadron. If this is an exploration mission, as was said at the council meeting, would not one of the dare devils of the elite pilot section be better suited? "

"Have you heard of the LightStar project." said the Admiral.

Harris said that he had come across some papers on the project but was under the impression it was a transport beaming system that had in fact failed to work and that the project had been abandoned some years ago.

The admiral after another long pause confirmed that the report Harris had read was the official story and was, in part, correct. What had not been let out however was the resurrection of the project. That had been one of the biggest secret projects ever undertaken by Central Command.

The admiral went on to outline the project, almost all of which was completely new to Harris. It seems this scientific genius on molecular energy patterns had produced a theory that you could move solid objects through space by causing changes in the molecular pattern of that object. He was given a small grant and set up a lab to prove the idea. Well, it seemed to work. The prospect of being able to beam up form a planet's surface into a space ship seemed about to become a reality. Power was the problem, however, and in the labs they could not generate enough power to move anything the distance needed to get into orbit.

In the broad scope of things, however, the cost of putting anything into orbit was still very high, so the economics of even an energy hungry machine looked good. Money was approved by the Central Finance Committee for a full scale pilot project capable to putting object into space.

Well the cost escalated, as they always do on these projects, but the cost of this project seemed to be getting out of control. There were arguments and the usual accusations but money kept being pored into the project with no visible results.

Eventually the device was ready for its first testing, it was a fairly big thing and had been built in special assembly hangers at a military base less than a thousand kilometers form where they were sitting, the Admiral nodded towards a distant collection of buildings. The Admirals predecessor and a few politicians were there to watch the first test. The drain on the planets power grid was noticeable when the device was switched on and several main generating stations blew fuses.

The Admiral could remember the day well, everything was battened down for security. The Admiral, a sergeant commander then, had spent a very boring day at a road post stopping all traffic from entering the region. Because maximum security surrounded the project it was not thought unusual that nothing had been heard from the hanger where the test had taken place. Not until later that evening did someone of a high enough rank start asking questions. The Admiral was part of the group that finally broke into the building, they found it empty. There was nothing there except for several piles of twisted rubber strips. A machine weighing several hundred tons, every one and every thing in the building had just vanished. The robot target station in orbit had recorded nothing, no transmission signal, no activity: nothing. Not one single clue about what had happened remained. There was allot of speculation but nobody knew for certain what happened. That is when the project was abandoned.

The Admiral paused to let what had been said sink in. Two years later Admiral Bainbridge, a fleet captain by then, was in charge of a survey ship in the Tran B18 solar system. They were moving toward the third moon of the fifth planet when their sensors registered signs of organic matter. This was odd because the whole system and been surveyed before and declared void of life and so suitable for mining. The traces of organic matter were followed. As they approached the third moon they found a body in civilian clothing drifting in orbit around the moon. This was a shock, if it had been anywhere near passenger traffic routes or any other inhabited planets it might not have been so unusual, but the Tran system was light years away from anywhere. They managed to get the frozen body on board and sent images back to command control. Two days later they got a reply, the body was one of the people who had been in attendance at the testing of the LightStar Project. Code Alpha One security was imposed and their mission was changed. They were to look for any other evidence of LightStar material.

Of course nether Bainbridge or any of the crew knew what they were supposed to be looking for. They started scanning for organic material, or as all the crew put it bluntly, looking for bodies. They scanned the moons of the fifth planet and the planet, then they moved to the sixth planet still nothing. They were getting bored of the whole thing when one of the astro observers noticed an asteroid behaving in an odd fashion just beyond the sixth planet. The asteroid was moving in eclipses and flashing some shinny surface every now and then. They went to investigate.

Stopping within several hundred meters of the asteroid they turned all their telescopes and scanners onto the small hunk of rock. There seemed nothing odd about it, then as it rotated in front of them there was the flash as the sun caught the edge of something on the surface. As the telescopes on board the survey ship were brought to bare on the object they were amazed to see a large machine half embedded in the surface of the asteroid. As no one on the survey ship had ever seen pictures of the secret project they did not know that the machine they were looking at was in fact the LightStar.

Somehow it had traveled across the Galaxy. When it was investigated at ground level it was found that it had not crashed into the asteroid. It had some how fused into the surface, half of it was locked inside the rock like some ancient fossil. There were no signs of other bodies or any of the other missing equipment, cabins, generators etc from the hanger, only the big green doughnut of the generating ring. The really odd thing, and the first clue to what had gone wrong was that all the rubber seals were missing.

The Admiral stopped talking as a door opened. A young girl tottered in from the outer office, her shoes clip clopped on the floor, she was wearing a tight silk dress and very high heeled shoes, nether of which conformed to regulation apparel. She was carrying a tray and Harris looked at her as she put the tray down on a low table and poured two cups of coffee from an insulated pot. She asked Harris if he wanted milk and sugar, Harris confirmed milk only. The young girl tottered back into the outer office.

"One of the perks of rank." said the Admiral smiling at Harris. "Do have one of the cakes. " Harris looked at the small plate of cream cakes the girl had put on the table. The Admiral picked one up and put it on a plate. "All artificial but taste wonderful and no calories between them." Harris bent down to take one. "Now where was I. " continued the Admiral.

"Well to cut a long story short."

It seems the boffins decided the LightStar was not so much a teleportation machine as a jump engine that could jump a space ship across the universe in an instant, although they were not quite sure why. As this was during the war there was money around for hush hush projects so the go ahead was given to produce a series of experimental craft. A small robot craft was built and actually made to work. So a full scale project was started, as there was some urgency due to the war, three craft were planned so there would be no hold ups if one failed for technical reasons.

This was a complex project and although the Admiral had been promoted and was now in overall charge of the military at Central Command he was not directly in charge of the LightStar project. Costs again went shooting up so Central Security put an expert team of managers in charge of the project. The aim was to get the project finished and keep costs down. A big argument blew up between the management team and the originator of the project, one Mickleton Jones. He was accused of deliberately causing unnecessary delays and was eventually kicked off the project.

Eventually a crew went aboard the first ship, it was self contained with its own generators, they were switched on, as expected the ship and all attached equipment vanished. Unfortunately it never came back, all communication was lost and it was never heard of again.

All hell broke loose to put it mildly, people were fired, arguments and accusations were flying everywhere.

As this was going on in management a group of boffins said they knew what had happened and were prepared to take the second ship with a volunteer crew on a test flight. No one at Central would dare to give the go ahead but every one was curious, so the keys were left under the door mat so to speak, without official sanction the crew started the second LightStar. The Admiral stopped his story. No longer looking at Harris the Admirals gaze was out of the window, not looking at the view but some distant memory.

After a somewhat long pause that started to go on a little too long Harris had to ask what had happened, had the second ship vanished? The Admiral, as if woken from a day dream looked at Harris. Slowly he spoke.

"There were some good men an that ship, good friends."

Harris did not interrupt this time he just let the Admiral have his time of reflection on what was obviously a painful memory. The second ship, it would seem, did vanish like the first. Harris sipped his coffee slowly, it was very good coffee.

At length the Admiral continued to explain how the project was totally abandoned. The facility where the LightStar ships had been built, a small high security base on one of the furthest moons of Morstan, was sealed off. The whole unit is out of bounds to all except the most essential personnel. A small group are kept there to maintain a low level watching brief just in case any contact with the lost ships was made. That was many months ago and nothing has ever been heard from either of the ships, the project was almost forgotten. The third and last ship, although completed was sealed and abandoned.

The Admiral stood up out of his chair and took the couple of paces to the large window where he looked out at the vast desert stretching uninterrupted to the distant horizon. Far off in the sky just above the horizon there were two disks of light, one a pale green the other an orange, two of Morstans moons just setting. These Harris knew to be Tallowine and Seffon, both in inhabited so neither were the place the Admiral had been talking about.

The Admiral did not seem to be in a hurry and the morning was beginning to drag so Harris thought he should perhaps prompt the Admiral again.

" I don't quite understand." said Harris. "From what you say the project was a total failure, yet the General Committee I was taken to seem to think that we were about to send a LightStar out to the fifth sector to look for a new staging planet between here and the Eastern sector. There seemed to be some debate about the prudence of this. " Harris said this to the back of the Admiral, who for several moments seemed not to have heard Harris at all.

The admiral turned and looked straight at Harris. "My daughter was aboard the second LightStar. "

The Admiral marched over to his desk and picked up a thick folder he came back to where Harris was still sitting, the Admiral opened the folder at a large photograph, he gave the folder to Harris. "Recognise this face? " ask the Admiral.

It was hard not to, the white untidy goatee beard the untidy sticky out hair, the wrinkled features, the malformed left ear, and the penetrating blue eyes. If anyone had tried to make themselves recognisable anywhere in the universe they could not have done a better job than this. This was the famous, or should it be infamous Quinlar Serrotos Haptron Raftos.

Quinlar Serrotos Haptron Raftos had a reputation that was half legend and half fact. His reputation was one of a freewheeling buccaneer, robbing the rich and being generous to the poor, a quick opportunist who would make a profit out of anything from mining deals to small wars. Always seemingly on the wrong side of the law he was a stateless renegade. There were books, stories, videos and comics about him. For anyone who had bothered to read the public files on him however they would quickly realise that most of the things written about him were fiction.

A petty crook and gun runner he leapt into the big time by buying a string of mining planets and selling on the mining rights, the fact that he did not have the money to buy the planets in the first place was not technically illegal. He moved on however to run a protection racket for mining cargo ships crossing near his sector. He now had far more money than he knew what to do with and a lot of it could not be banked, so he started buying up other crooks rackets. Gambling, drugs, smuggling, hideout planets. It was these activities that had built his reputation.

At heart Raftos was however and adventurer, the money meant nothing to him, he would often jump into a hot spot, a small war, a disaster just to sort it out.

The Admiral sat down again on the easy chair looking out the window, he leaned over the table and picked up the coffee pot and ask Harris if he wanted another coffee.

The Admiral started talking again this time with more clarity and urgency, for the events he now described had happened less than six days ago. Raftos it seems had landed on Petra, the moon where the LightStar base was, with a large party of armed rebels and took over the LightStar instillation. Alarm bells went off all over the Central Command Security. The moon was surrounded by Star Cruisers, Raftos was going no where, but he did not intend to.

Raftos established contact with the Supreme Command and stated his intention to start the last remaining LightStar. Admiral Bainbridge was in command and filled with mixed emotions. Raftos was holding hostages, he could not escape and was unlikely to want a ransom. Why did he want LightStar. What was more to the point how had he found out about the most secret base in the universe. The last question was the easiest to answer Raftos had connections all over even in Central Command, with his kind of money even top secrets were a tradeable commodity. But again LightStar was a failed project surely even Raftos must have known that.

Then it struck Central Command that perhaps he did not, perhaps he thought he was going to steal the most advanced space ship in the universe, that was more like something Raftos would do. The question was, should they tell him?

They transmitted all the files and data to Raftos on Petra for him to see what had happened to the two previous LightStars. There was a two day stand off while Raftos studied the data, then, much to Central Command's surprise Raftos put the camera network back on line. From inside LightStar he signalled his intention to take the last LightStar on its maiden voyage. With a big smile he pushed the generators into action.

As expected the LightStar disappeared from view as the cameras in the construction hanger recorded each moment of the event. Admiral Bainbridge wondered what Raftos was thinking, was he just curious to know where the other ships had gone. The Admiral had to hold back a tear as he wondered if Raftos would find his daughter.

Two hours forty three minutes fifteen seconds two hundred and twenty eight microseconds later, LightStar Three reappeared in the hanger.

The communication monitors flickered on and there was the smiling face of Raftos. Despite themselves and the circumstances that had unfolded, the hostages at the research lab and the people at Command Control Center could not help but give a cheer.

"Now." said Raftos over the communication link. "We can negotiate."