Amethyst Planet

Pulsar Sky System

Back on the surface, Grace was running through the Amethyst city. She had encountered some kind of wolf-like creature. It stood at around four feet high and had incredibly sharp-looking teeth. She had initially been concerned that she hadn’t been able to outrun it in the darkness, but so far, she hadn’t been ripped to shreds. Turning down a new street, she looked back to see if it was still with her, which it didn’t seem to be.

Panting she dropped to a walk and crouched over. She squinted ahead, in the darkness, and found she was outside a gigantic, oval building. The large doors were lodged open, and she made her way inside.

To her human eyes, it looked like the sort of place where one might buy tickets, with barriers and desks where presumably cash registers had stood. The building was dark with significant damage from the bombings. She knew it was a risk to enter any of these buildings without knowing what the structural integrity was like, but she had having seen the local predators, she didn’t want stay outside.

Unfolding her slate and using it as a flashlight, she wandered through the corridors until it opened out out on a large open field. A sports arena.

There were several poles at each end of the field, the grass long since overgrown but surrounded by seating. It was very similar to what she would expect to find on any world in the cluster.

The top level had a type of observation boxes. She ventured back inside and decided to see how high she could get. Grace thought she might get a view of the surrounding city from there, which might help her. She found a door to some stairs, careful to hold on to the handrail just in case.

It took a while, but she made it into the box, but she wasn’t able to see much beyond the field itself. There was some luxuriant seating… and then she noticed something special. She walked over to the far corner to a case with several trophies in it. A quick scan with her slate and found high concentrations of gemstones and minerals—appearing to be solid gold, but there was more to it than that, this was an entirely new element, it also had a sapphire encrusted in it. Whatever a gold cup would normally sell for at home, this origin would put it into a category ten times that.

She recorded images with her slate to act as providence that she might prove the origins of the pieces. She knew the auction house of the Cluster would love something like this, but she needed to prove the providence.

Now, how to open that case? She didn’t want to simply smash it; that would be unbecoming. But for all intents and purposes, it appeared to be a sealed unit much harder than simple glass, which didn’t allow her many options. She tried to see if there was a way to access it from the top. Her slate could not offer any hints where the best access point would be.

Exasperated, Grace searched around for anything that might be robust enough to do some damage to the case. The chairs in the room were all far too heavy for her to lift on her own, and the ones outside were bolted down. This would be an issue.

Everything here was an alien artefact. If there were vending machines, she could probably get something out of those.

Grace knew she had to retrieve that trophy, it was her future encased in that bloody box get that trophy. It would be just that—her trophy for when she returned to the cluster and could trade it in, pay off the stolen ship, and then use the rest to pay for a life of travel, exploring any archaeological dig she desired.

She smiled at the thought. But the case was proving difficult to get into. Peering down to the overgrown sports field, she realised just how high it was. She looked around the stadium; there was quite a big drop to hand. She hoped it would be enough to let her gain access to the cabinet, however the security system worked.

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There was a chunk of rock. It looked like it had been part of the roof and crumbled in. She picked it up the rock, and threw it over then took a running jump, and made the mistake of looking down. As she reached the other side, she grabbed onto the sides of the cabinet and hung on, not wanting to fall down.

Lowering herself to the floor, she lifted the rock in her right hand and brought it down with all her might on the case, assuming naively it was simply glass that would shatter on impact. Her hand felt like she had just punched a wall, which in some ways was exactly what she’d done.

The rock split in her hand and fell to the ground below, clinking along the wall as it fell before finally making something of a distant thud against the floor when it finally landed.

Grace Screamed in frustration. Angry that it was far harder than it looked, she stood up and stamped her foot on the cabinet. Nothing happened. She was relieved a moment later when she hadn’t fallen through a case of glass on an uninhabited planet with no backup. That would have ended things quickly for her. She carefully climbed down to the box's floor and tried to rethink this. The case was sealed, and simply using brute force was not working.

She decided instead to walk around the stadium, give herself time to think. After ten minutes, she found another of the viewing rooms and yet another of the trophy cabinets. They were also covered in gemstones, and her slate indicated if anything, this one would be of even more value than the first. There had been some damage to the room, and the floor had fallen away.

The box level was at least ten stories high and it looked as if the floors below had also suffered under the bombardment. Grace was careful not to fall in. With the trophy cabinets on the far side of this gap, she would have to take a running jump if she wished to get across.

The hole was about a metre and a half across—not an impossible jump, but not the sort of needless risk she should take on a whim. She looked at her slate as it gave her the lowdown on the trophies, and she noticed something else. The case itself was damaged. There was a crack in the bottom corner that was just large enough that she might get a hand inside and then the trophy.

“This is probably going to be the stupidest thing I ever try,” she said out loud to no one in particular. Clipping her slate safely back onto her belt, she took a few steps back before running and jumping the gap to the far side.

The floor shuddered as she landed, proving it was not the secure platform she had hoped for. Pieces of the floor dropped away and bounced down to the level below. She ran as quickly as she could to the far wall as more stone fell away. Turning around, the gap had increased to two metres or more.

“Dammit.” While she was reasonably confident she could still make it back, the risk was growing. She ran a piece of software on her slate that had records of sales to estimate the value of anything she found. She had it calculate the value of the trophy in front of her from the gems alone, not able to compensate for the fact that this was an alien artefact. Nothing of non-terrestrial origin had ever been sold in the cluster or the rest of human-controlled space, of course. But from the precious metal and gemstones used in its construction, the software estimated its value to be... Grace closed it immediately.

It was a mouthwateringly large amount of money.

“Fine,” she said to herself as she looked down at the pit she needed to get across. “I’ll give it a go.”