Description
The story takes place on two planets. The first is an Earth-like world called Xerxes. On it, two figures are seen playing a strange game. One, an old woman named Mitri, is identified as the controller of the game while the other, a male whose head is obscured by a glowing ball of red light, is referred to as the Planet Master. The two speak cryptically of things being put into motion, and the Master instructs Ilvar, one of his military commanders, to send a ship on a rescue mission to the other world, Morganthus, for a ship that has disappeared.
Without delay, the spaceship Quest blasts off to Morganthus. As it approaches the planet\'s atmosphere, it suddenly veers out of control; the captain and tech officer are able to do a controlled crash landing on the surface. After recovering from the crash, the mission team leave the Quest to search for survivors.
Crossing the landscape of the planet, they eventually reach the other vessel where they find evidence that a massacre has taken place. While wrapping up their survey of the ship, a high-strung young member of the team becomes increasingly terrified despite being reassured by his seniors. A short time later, while he is alone, he is killed by a grotesque creature that immediately vanishes, leaving only his mutilated body for the search team to find.
Back on the ship, the crew discover a giant structure that is the source of the energy that wrecked them. While the captain and two others remain on the Quest, Ilvar and Cabren lead the rest of the crew to explore the structure. One by one, the members of the mission begin to experience a growing sense of dread and terror in the same way the crewman previously killed had. Shortly after these experiences begin, each one is attacked by some kind of creature that is an expression of basic, primal fears -- tentacles, dismembered arms, inanimate objects, giant worms, shadowy figures.
On the Quest, crewman Ranger catches sight of Captain Trantor running through the ship as if being attacked, and on the security cameras he sees her spontaneously combust as she fires a weapon in an airlock. He and the ship\'s cook join the remaining survivors of the dwindling mission in the pyramid. Ranger begins to feel the terror effect, and is soon attacked by a double. He manages to fend the double off, regains control of himself while doing so, and the double fades away. He finds Cabren, the other remaining survivor, and tells him. Cabren then discovers that the ship\'s cook is really the Planet Master seen at the beginning of the film. The Master forces Cabren to confront all of the monsters that attacked the others; he does so successfully, and the Master tells him that he has \"won the game.\" The Master then explains that the pyramid is actually an ancient toy for the children of a long-extinct race, built in order to test their ability to control fear. Angered, Cabren kills the Master\'s previous host body, but as the Master himself cannot die, Cabren becomes his new host.
Science fiction suspense thriller, in which a rescue space ship crew meets up with horrors projected by their own imaginations. The spacecraft is in a free search in galaxy. On one of the planets in the galaxy astronauts found a spaceship probably belonged to an ancient civilization. People want to understand the causes of the disaster occurred and to find out who owned a ship.
