The theft

CHAPTER 11 — The Theft

The mansion of Cromatica slept.
The garden lights had gone out one by one as the night advanced. The streets of the residential sector were empty. Earth's sky was dark and clean, with stars that didn't match any trinita galactic map.
Germon and Braga waited.Not impatiently.With the stillness of two men who had learned that the right moment was worth more than speed.
Midnight.
Germon moved first.The robes were still on. Biological sensors suppressed. His steps across the side garden's ground were calculated to generate no detectable vibration.
Braga followed two meters behind.
The mansion's perimeter wall was low for someone with Germon's physical condition. He crossed it with no visible effort. Braga followed immediately after.
They landed on the inner grass without a sound.
The side entrance was locked with a standard Earth home security system.Basic compared to any trinita technology.
Braga took out a device the size of a finger. He placed it over the lock panel. Three seconds. A soft click.
The door yielded.They entered.
---
The mansion's interior was completely silent.Dark, except for the faint light coming through the windows. Enough to move if you knew where you were going.
Germon knew where he was going.
They climbed the stairs. The third step creaked slightly under Braga's weight. Both stopped.
Silence.Nothing moved in the mansion.
They continued.
Sira's room was at the end of the corridor.The door was slightly ajar.
Germon stopped at the threshold.
Inside, Sira's breathing was steady. Deep. The sleep of someone who had finished her to-do list and gone to bed with nothing left pending.
Germon didn't enter the room.He watched from the doorway.
The desk was to the right, by the window. The three lists lay on its surface, all completed, exactly where he had seen them through the AI's instruments.
The bottom drawer.
---
Braga entered first.
His movements were different from most trinita soldiers. It wasn't strength he had. It was precision. Each step placed with a spatial awareness that came from years of doing exactly this kind of work.
He reached the desk without waking anything.He opened the bottom drawer with a slowness that made the movement almost silent.
Inside, wrapped in dark cloth, it was there.
He took it.
The dark cloth fell slightly as he opened the wrapping to confirm the contents.
The square greenish-blue emerald pulsed once upon contact with the air.
Braga covered it again immediately.He looked at Germon from the doorway.A minimal gesture with his head.
Confirmed.
---
Sira moved.
Both froze.A shift in the bed. A change of position. Her breathing altered for two seconds.
Then it returned to normal.Deep. Steady.
She remained asleep.
They left the room.Down the corridor.Down the stairs. The third step, this time, avoided entirely.Through the side entrance.Through the garden.Over the wall.
Outside.
They walked toward the northern hills without hurrying.There was no reason to run.No one knew they had been there.No one knew they were leaving.
The Kratar rested in Braga's hands, wrapped in its dark cloth, not pulsing. Not reacting. As if waiting to see what would happen next.
Germon walked ahead.Hands behind his back.With his usual calm.
---
The ship waited for them behind the hills, exactly where they had left it.
They boarded.Braga placed the Kratar carefully on the navigation table.Germon looked at it for a moment before sitting down.
"Course for the Great Portal," he said.
"Understood," Braga replied from the controls.
The ship rose silently over the hills.Over the green valley.Over the Earth that continued sleeping, unaware of what it had just lost.
And disappeared into space.
---
The Great Portal was still open.
The colossal ring floated in space, light blue energy running through its structure in constant lines. Waiting. Patient.
Germon's ship crossed it without slowing down.
Space distorted.And on the other side was his universe.
His stars.His familiar routes.His empire.
Planet Trinita appeared on the main screen twenty minutes later.White and luminous from a distance. Light blue energy lines running across its surface like the veins of a perfectly ordered organism.
Germon looked at it from the command bridge.Not with nostalgia.With the cold satisfaction of someone returning to where he belonged, carrying what he had come for.
---
They landed in the fortress's private hangar.
Germon took the Kratar personally this time.He carried it to the analysis room. A windowless chamber with energy measurement instruments capable of breaking down any material known to the empire into its most basic components.
He placed the Kratar on the central platform.The instruments began to process.
Germon watched the readings.
The first data was confusing.The system took longer than usual to classify the artifact's energy. Not because it was weak. But because it didn't match any existing category in the trinita database.
It wasn't technological energy.It wasn't conventional radiation.It wasn't any known mineral.
It was something the instruments had no name for, and therefore simply classified as an unknown class anomaly.
Germon read that without reaction.
"Dangerous in terms of radiation or contamination?" he asked.
Braga checked the secondary data.
"Negative, sir. It emits nothing harmful in its passive state."
"Does it have any detectable activation mechanism?"
"Negative. No circuits. No mechanical components. It's a solid mineral structure with internal energy properties the instruments can't explain."
Germon looked at the Kratar on the platform.The square greenish-blue emerald. The K in the center of that distinct green. Still. Not pulsing. As if waiting for something the instruments couldn't measure.
"How does it work?" Germon murmured.
It wasn't a question for Braga.It was a question for himself.
He had seen the Kratar work that morning on Earth. A simple request. An immediate response. No ritual. No spell. No intermediate apparatus.
Just intention.And result.
He took it from the platform.He held it in his hands.He looked directly at it.
And he said quietly, with the precision of someone testing a hypothesis.
"Show me what you are."
The Kratar did nothing.It remained still. Cold. No visible response.
Germon watched it for several more seconds.Then he placed it back on the platform.
"It doesn't respond to just anyone," he said.
It wasn't frustration.It was another observation.Another piece of data.
Braga looked at him from the side.
"What do we do with it, sir?"
Germon looked at the artifact a moment longer.
"For now," he said, "we guard it. And we learn."
He turned toward the door.
"And we wait for its owners to come looking for it."
Because they would.Germon knew it with the same certainty he knew everything else he had calculated correctly in his life.
They would come.It was only a matter of time.


END OF CHAPTER 11