Commander Bennet was standing next to a waist-high table, his eyes rapidly scanning the topological map that was rolled out in front of him. “Here,” he pronounced, jabbing his index finger at a large, unusually flat area between two hills. “Tell them to drill here.”
A junior officer made a note of the coordinates before turning on his heel and running out of the tent.
Commander Bennet stood staring at the map. His eyes were blazing orbs of polished magnetite; an involuntary movement of his mouth caused the bristles of his moustache to twitch.
“Could this be it,” he thought. “Could this be the hidden treasure of the ancients; the energy source that will power us to victory?”
It had always seemed an implausible rumour. The ancients, it was said, had stockpiled vast fields of potential energy, presumably as insurance against future energy crises. These stockpiles had never been tapped and remained buried, hidden and forgotten. Most intelligent people dismissed these rumours as the magical thinking of a down trodden society. Bennet was among the sceptical until, one day, he was called into a secret briefing and shown irrefutable evidence that these energy fields existed.
Bennet had been put in command of an elite force whose job it was to find the energy fields and extract their contents.
“Could this be it?” Bennet said aloud.
At that moment, the junior officer returned to the tent, a look of great excitement on his face.
“Good news sir,” he exclaimed, “we’ve struck plastic.”
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