Read Book of the Guardian 3: The Last Mission for Free Online Page A

an urgent matter has been brought to our attention and must be investigated immediately. My apologies, but Court is canceled this day. Until the morrow, I bid you all, Good Day!" He was already heading for the door while he finished speaking and didn't even see the entire room bow in response.
    He sprinted down the hallway leading back to his quarters, using his comm implant to call ahead. "Hanna, I canceled court. Something has come up. You might want to delay the defense consortium for a couple of hours, too."
    "Understood, Sire. I will have your transport readied and notify your guard," Hanna replied.
    "Do you even know where I'm going, Hanna?"
    "The Ministry of Intelligence and Information Sire. It's where you always go in this type of situation," Hanna replied logically.
    He opened the door to his quarters and was now in the same room as Hanna, so he closed the comm and simply spoke to her. "What would I ever do without you, Hanna?"
    "Flounder about helplessly. Go put on your armor, I'll handle the rest," the woman said and nodded over her shoulder to the door to his inner quarters.
    Mark winked at her and went to change. When he came back out, Hanna was ready to go, she had a satchel over one shoulder and an energy bar in one hand for him. Two armored guards were also there waiting for him. He grabbed the energy bar, and led the procession out the door, down the hall to his private landing pad, and to the transport waiting there.
    Minister Gadfries was waiting for him when they landed at the Ministry Pad. Mark was the first down the ramp. "How certain are you about this, Jed?" Mark asked.
    "Very, Sire. However, the information is somewhat troubling as well. Come, I'll show you what I mean," the old man replied. "I think we should do something for these traders as well, Sire. They went to extraordinary lengths to get this information back to us."
    "Oh?" Mark asked. "How so?"
    "Well, they started out as a group of five ships carrying food stuffs and agro-machine parts. Once the Tammerain figured out that they had gotten too close, they sent out warships to hunt them down. They lost three of the ships and crews. One of the other ships was badly damaged, but managed to make temporary repairs sufficient to continue. It took them almost two years to get back to Human space. Sire, they had to jump laterally to get out of Tammerain Space, and completely circumvent the border. They went into inter-galactic space by almost five hundred light years in order to lose the pursuit vessels. Their navigator then plotted a reverse course jump, adjusting for distance, to bring them back into our space. They arrived last evening and are still in medical."
    "Medical?" Mark asked.
    "They are all suffering from dehydration and malnutrition. A few of them had other wounds suffered earlier in battles. They knew how important this information was to us, and they did the impossible in order to make sure we got it. I should mention that they were all unconscious when we boarded them. It had been a close thing for them.
    "We are still going through their logs, and what information we've gotten has come from the Captain's logs, as well as other messages left for us in the computer systems of the ships," Gadfries reported.
    They had arrived in the main operations room, and Mark could see a few of the people working on what had to be the logs of the trading ships. "So what's troubling about this, Jed?"
    The older man led him into a smaller room that still had terminals in it. He stepped up to one of them and began typing. "This is the world we believe is their Capitol, There isn't a lot of detail, because of the distance. However, if we compare the astrometric readings from the same time period, there doesn't appear to be a planet located there. As you can see, we have the rest of the planets in the system showing up and all is well except for this one world; it appears to not have a gravity well and is not affecting the other large bodies in that