The Mandate of Heaven (5 page)

“I’m afraid it gets worse,” my father interrupted my thoughts.

I could only stare at him, agog.  With over a billion people estimated to have perished in the past year alone, the virus having spread to almost every planet in the Imperium, how could it possibly get any worse.  “How?” I demanded incredulously.

“There was a report of yet another attack by the Radicals, just yesterday, on one of the Hyundai-Samsung planets, owned by High-Lord Lee Hyun-woo.  Reports say that many tens of thousands were killed, the factories completely destroyed.”

“That's what the third, fourth attack, this year?”

“Something like that,” my father agreed.  “They seem to be increasing in frequency and intensity, nobody seems to know who is behind them.  With the targets appearing to be chosen at random, the various High-Lords are at each other’s throats, each accusing the other of being behind the attacks.  If they don’t stop soon, then I don’t think it will be very much longer before one of the High-Lords retaliates against another.”

“You’re talking about open warfare between the High-Lords?  Civil war?”  With a grim nod from my father, I exploded in fury.  “Are they all mad?  Civilization is coming to an end.  The Imperium is on the precipice of complete disintegration and all they want to do is war with one another?”

“They view it as a direct challenge to their personal authority and power, they won’t stand for it.”

“And already over a billion dead is not enough for them?”

“They would gladly sacrifice them, and more, as long as it keeps them in power.”

“Then perhaps a war would be a good thing, let them kill each other.  Good riddance I say.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like one of those Radicals.”

“I cannot believe that you’re defending them, you, of all people.  You hate the High-Lords more than most, especially after what they did to you...” I trailed off, as I wasn’t exactly sure just
what
they had done to him.  While I had come to observe the wounds that they had inflicted on him, both inside and out, he always refused to discuss them with me.  However, through the process of elimination, I had at least determined which High-Lord bore the brunt of his anger, as he would talk about all except one, High-Lord Stanton.

“You would have them all murdered, perhaps in their bed, while they slept?” My father suggested in a quiet tone of voice that I had come to recognise when I was treading on dangerous ground.

“If that is what it takes to finally be free of them,” I nodded approvingly.  “High-Lord Stanton first,” I injected hoping that his name would bring my father around to my way of thinking.

While he tensed at the name, he continued on regardless, “And his wife Lady Stanton, too?”

“Well—”

“And also don’t forget their daughter, I seem to remember she is about your age.  Surely she must also die, as she is related by blood?” he left the question hanging in the air.

Silence echoed around the two of us and I had to quickly close my mouth, the words, “
Whatever it takes,”
still on the tip of my tongue, but of course, I didn’t really mean that.

My father didn’t seem to notice.  Instead he picked up one of the two photographs that adorned his desk, staring at the picture, with something akin to pain in his eyes.  “That’s the problem with killing, you see? It’s easy to start, but so very difficult to stop.”

“Then what are we going to do about it?” I demanded.

“Do? About what?” he asked distractedly, his eyes still drawn to the photograph that he held lovingly in his hands.

“Sagouran Fever.  The Radicals.  Civil War.  What do you think I’m talking about?  What happened to you?  You sit here every day, somehow apart from the rest of us, as if none of this matters.”

“I intervened once, long ago.  It was a terrible mistake.  I used to think like you, that somehow I had the right, but I was wrong and somebody else paid the price for that error in my judgement.  So we’re going to do nothing.  My recommendation that all incoming ships be turned away remains and that should keep us safe enough.  The rest of the Imperium will have to manage on their own; there is nothing more that we can do.  Look on the bright side son, you’re going to have a ringside seat to observe the collapse of the Imperium and most likely the human race.”

I shrugged off the hand he rested on my shoulder, watching from the corner of my eye as he struggled to his feet and, with Lucifer close on his heels, he shut the door to his study quietly behind him.  With frustration raging through me, I took the still warm seat behind his desk that he had just vacated.  Trying to put myself in his place, I tried to think what I could do differently, but after a few minutes, eyebrows furrowed in concentration, I finally gave up and slammed my fists on the desk with a violent urge to break something.  As much as I disagreed with my father, I couldn’t come to any other conclusion.  Perhaps, if I had somehow known about these events in advance, I could have done something to stop them but, by now, it was far too late.

Looking up from the pitted writing surface of my father’s antique desk, I noticed his closed journal and, without thinking, flipped it open, turning to the last entry.

Today thirty more souls rest heavily on my conscience; I wonder just how many lives have now been extinguished on my orders?  I have long since lost count.  I justify my actions like so many others
—
that I had no other choice, but did I?  I had no way to be certain if the crew were infected or not, but could I take that chance?  There are over thirty thousand lives on Arcturus that would have been at risk had I been wrong, but only one really matters—Michael, he is all that I have left.

I hastily slammed the book shut.  The leather bound cover still warm from my father’s touch and my hands were trembling, just from touching his precious journal.  It felt like I was holding his soul in my hands.  Looking up I noticed that my earlier actions had also knocked over the two photographs on his desk.  Hoping that I had not damaged either, I quickly lifted the first, looking into the warm brown eyes of my mother.  According to my father, it was the last picture that was taken of her before she left.  He told me a little about her, when I had become old enough to understand that I must have had one.  According to him she had died in a transport accident, the ship lost, forever, while visiting her family.

As always it was the second picture that drew my attention.

For a start I had no idea who the woman was.  With her deep blue eyes and long flowing brown hair, the colour of roasted chestnuts.  While she was not smiling in the picture, there seemed to be a spark in her eyes that made me think she had found something amusing about the scene, but hadn’t dared to give any visible sign of her delight.  She was richly dressed, the Cerulean flowing gown, diamonds sparkling in her hair and sapphires pinned to her ears that matched her eyes.  As always my breath caught in my throat at her beauty, but it was far more than that as she seemed so alive, as if at any moment she would wink back at me.

I hadn’t failed to notice that it was this picture that my father reached for, never my mother’s.  I constantly wondered who she was and how my father knew her.  From the picture it was obvious she was wealthy, probably related to some High-Lord.  My thoughts as always ran wild.  Imagining that she was married to some rich Lord, perhaps she had been my father’s mistress for a short while.  Had he loved her?  The expression on his face was always sad, wistful even, when he stared at her picture, as if he wished that things had turned out differently.  I couldn't envisage my father ever leaving her, so I always believed she had left him.

Unconsciously my hand reached out, echoing the same gesture as my father and without even realising it I touched her image.  I almost dropped it when the picture bleeped, vanishing, to be replaced with a simple message prompting me that was the end of the file and did I wish to search for additional images?

It wasn’t a picture at all, but some kind of remote access terminal.

I had used similar devices before, at work, to remotely access the mainframe computer.  It was like carrying a small shard of it around with you.  I was therefore familiar with the interface, yet ours was nothing like this.  I had never seen such a thin, lightweight model before.  It looked exactly like a picture frame; several inches high, half that wide, about as thick as a piece of glass.  It had no visible power button, or any other controls, just a compact matt-black back with a glass front.

Dismissing the message, I quickly flicked through the other images on the device, they were all the same woman, but in different poses.  Many of them were of her by herself, but in other ones she was joined by a similarly aged woman, a sister, I guessed.  Other pictures showed a much older man, her father?  I assumed that they were all related, but that was all the device contained, a dozen images.  I certainly agreed with my father’s choice, as the final picture of the young woman was by far the most flattering.

Who was she?  Who were
they?

Having once again come to the end of the gallery of images, I was presented with the message prompting me to search for additional results.  Only hesitating for a fraction of a second, I quickly tapped the device, confirming the request and unconsciously held my breath waiting for the results.  They came back only a few seconds later and were deeply disappointing.  The device reported that no other images were found in the planetary cache however, the next line shook me to my core.

It was prompting me to search the external company network, the corporate-extranet.  This was it, the very proof that I had been looking for.  For what I did know about such a device was that it had a very limited range, nothing more than a kilometre, certainly it couldn’t reach back to the town and the spaceport. There had to be a Superluminal Transmitter very close by and I was determined to find it.  Then I would confront my father, once and for all, as it was time that he told me everything.

My father had long warned me about hubris, of repeating the mistakes of the past and I had arrogantly ignored him.  But unwittingly I had already started down the same path that he had once trod.  This time however, it would not be some unknown person to pay the ultimate price, it would be him, my father.  For I had never stopped to consider that maybe others were also interested in my father’s past.  People with dark secrets of their own that would do anything to stop them coming to light, even to silence him, forever.

For I had unwittingly set events in motion that would one day kill him.

I hear people constantly complain that there is never any justice.  They are wrong of course, as everybody is forced to stand in judgement—one day.  I, too, will ultimately kneel before those who I have wronged and plead for their forgiveness.

I pray for that day to come soon.

—From the journal of
Lord Alexander Greystone
,

The first thing that I did, the very next day, was to take some time off work.  This was easily accomplished, as word had already spread about the events of the previous day and my father’s decision to quarantine Arcturus.  The announcement was initially met with some scepticism; business was always light this far out on the edge of the Imperium and my father’s declaration pretty much killed off any lingering hope.  However, a few well-placed words with Nick on the way home and word quickly got out that the Virus had already reached Canis Major and the grumbling soon abated.  Good old Nick, all I had to do was to tell him to keep it to himself.  If nothing else, he was a dependable gossip.

This then left me with plenty of time to continue my own investigations.  I confess that I did explore a few local hills and spent some time pondering the possibility of hiding a fusion reactor underwater as we had a lake close by. In hindsight it seems ridiculous, but at the time it was all I could think of.

I thought that I had found a lucky break when I managed to sneak one of the remote terminals out of the spaceport.  While it couldn’t access the Superluminal Transmitter it was able to detect the carrier signal and I spent a fruitless afternoon wandering around aimlessly monitoring signal strengths.  It was pointless, as the signal strength remained constant wherever I was in the house, only dropping off the further I travelled away from the property.  It seemed as if the source of the signal was coming from the house itself, which was patently absurd.

In the end it was simple luck that came to my rescue.  While the remotes could be powered by their carrier signal, it wasn’t one hundred percent efficient and eventually the remote had to be recharged, at the source.  I had no misconceptions about my ability for subterfuge and my father had an uncanny knack for knowing where I was at all times, hence I ‘borrowed’ a micro-security camera from the spaceport.  We used them all the time to remotely monitor the freight passing through the port.  Small, easily concealed and self-powered, they were perfect for what I had in mind.  I doubt my father would have known what it was had he found it, he was never particularly technologically inclined, simply referring to them as my doo-hickeys.

I watched, via the monitor, as my father worked late one night in his study, when the ‘picture’ on his desk blinked a few times, before vanishing completely.  He looked up in annoyance before glancing around the room.  I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination, but he seemed to stare into the lens of the camera for an inordinate amount of time, before picking the device up from the desk and turning round to face his bookshelf.  Pulling a book, seemingly at random, he stepped through the portal that had smoothly slid open, disappearing from the camera’s view.  A hidden door in the bookshelf.  It was just so melodramatic and overdone—horribly gauche.

To be honest, I thought that my father had better taste.

*****

I think waiting until I could investigate that hidden door in my father’s study must have been the longest wait of my life.  I knew what Aladdin must have felt like, waiting in front of the Cave of Wonders.  Anticipation was an understatement.  I could barely sit still and instead found myself pacing my room, checking the monitor every few minutes.  Eventually he returned, an hour or so later, replacing the book and the portal slid shut.  The picture still in his hand, now recharged and with a bottle of something in the other, he left his study.  A few moments later I heard his footsteps outside my door, but they didn’t stop, instead echoing further down the corridor to his own bedroom.  Obviously he had decided to break with tradition and sleep in his own bed, for once.

All the better for me.

I forced myself to wait until he fell asleep, although I dared not check too soon, as he was an incredibly light sleeper.  As quietly as possible, I tiptoed down the hall, reminding me of years past when I used to sneak out, after dark, to join Nick and some of our other friends for illicit rendezvous.  Arriving at the study, it took me a few attempts, but I eventually found the correct book.  I shook my head in disbelief as the bookshelf once again slid open, revealing the passage behind it.  I felt like I was trapped in some gothic period drama, especially after I took a burning candelabra to illuminate my path.  I held my breath, waiting to stumble across a coffin, along with a slumbering occupant, with excessively long canines.

I’d definitely been reading too many of the wrong type of novels.

In the end the candelabra proved unnecessary, as following the stone steps in a downward spiral, soft white light lit up my path, vanishing into inky blackness behind me.  It was the first hint of any sort of technology in a house that was still heated by fireplaces and illuminated by candles.  My anticipation continued to grow with each footstep forward, until the spiral staircase came to an abrupt halt and the passage split into two separate corridors.  With a shrug I followed the right-hand one, reasoning that I could always double back if I didn’t find anything.  It was unnecessary as it could have only been a dozen more steps further down the corridor when it widened into a massive room and my mouth dropped open in surprise.

For facing me, piled high to the ceiling, several feet above me, was rack-upon-rack of bottles.  The racks, dozens of them, disappeared into the distance as far as my eyes could see which, from the well-spaced lights protruding from the ceiling, must have been some distance.  Snapping my mouth shut I took a step forward, towards the nearest rack and withdrew the closest, extremely dusty, bottle.  I had to wipe it, first with my hand, then the edge of my shirt to remove the dirt and grime, before I could clearly read the label.

I recognised the writing immediately, from my father’s lessons, English, an ancient dialect once written and spoken on Earth, before being replaced with our Standard Basic.  The label simply stated
Silver Oak
,
Cabernet Sauvignon, California, 2030
.  The first few words meant nothing to me, but I remembered from my lessons that California was one of the forty-three states that made up the United States of Earth, a powerful nation back on Earth before the Exodus.  I assumed that the last few numbers were dates, and doing some quick mental arithmetic, came to the conclusion that the bottle I was holding in my hand was a little over five hundred years old.

I almost dropped it.

With a great deal more care than I used to extract it, I carefully slid the bottle back into the rack, before brushing away at the label of the next, some sort of
Bordeaux
, whatever that meant; this bottle was even older, the next the same and the next.  After reading half a dozen labels I had not found a bottle that was less than five hundred years old and there must have been hundreds of them, maybe thousands, stored in the room.

I couldn’t even begin to guess at the combined price of them, remembering a story a few years back of High-Lord Zhang having once spent over two million credits purchasing a single bottle of wine from Earth, but that bottle had been barely two hundred years old.

I suddenly remembered Nick stating that my father was as rich as Croesus and I suddenly found myself laughing out loud.  Croesus would have been an absolute pauper compared to the wealth on display here.  Noticing that a couple of racks seemed to be empty, I idly wondered what my father had done with those bottles.  Sold them perhaps?  Suddenly an image popped into my head, of my father re-entering his study, with the picture frame in one hand, and the other—a bottle, surely one of these, but why?  What could he want with it?  Suddenly a horrible thought came to mind, it was so terrifying that I immediately dismissed it, but I couldn’t and it just simply grew stronger, more certain.  My father never went anywhere.  He hardly ever left his study, even then only usually going as far as the kitchen or his bedroom.  Hardly enough time to sell, let alone auction—he was drinking them.  My father was unconcernedly quaffing bottles of wine, five hundred years old, worth
at least
a few million each.

Just the thought of it made me feel sick to my stomach.

*****

Having retraced my steps, this time I turned left at the junction, my hands shaking, wondering what I would discover through door number two.  Like the first passage this one also opened up into a much larger chamber, a few dozen metres further on.  It occurred to me that I must be underneath the house, deep in its foundations and these caverns must have been hollowed out during its construction or, even more tantalising, that maybe these caverns pre-dated the house and instead it was built on top of them to hide whatever was hidden below.  Either way, whoever originally built the massive property above had been very clever, or extremely paranoid.

Probably both.

In many ways what I found in the second cavern was a disappointment, as it didn’t consist of endless mountains of gold, gems or other precious metals like I would expect to find in the Cave of Wonders, nor was it a solitary coffin, with a slumbering Nosferatu.  For me it was all of the above—and more.

It was a single, solitary, ship.

About seventy metres in length, maybe about the same in width, considering its wing-span, it was obviously designed for atmospheric flight. However its massive ion engines at the rear equally identified this as a spaceship, able to soar amongst the stars.  But it was not this that impressed me, as I had seen a great many such ships before, after all I did work in a spaceport.

What was most extraordinary was that I recognised this ship.

Working in a spaceport, with many different ships, you mentally started to categorise them; starting from the rusting freighter scows, held together by nothing more than duct tape. There was a pecking order working up, across the various corvettes, freighters and frigates we saw day-in, day-out.  Above these there were the larger starships that could never make planet-fall, the destroyers, cruisers and battleships.  At the very top of the list were the various flagships of the High-Lords, beyond that were the
specials…

Everybody had their own personal favourite, perhaps High-Lord Zhang’s personal runabout that still held the record for the Kestrel run, or High-Lord Stanton’s pleasure cruiser; long rumoured to be crewed only by the most heart-stopping beautiful women—clothing optional and hardly advisable.

But late at night, when the lights were turned down low and the drinks flowed freely, then discussions turned to the truly legendary ones that were only rumoured to even exist, cloaked in mystery that people heard fleetingly about.  At the top of the list was the
Celeste,
the shuttle of Professor Henry Alcubierre.  There were precious few pictures of the ship, and as for its performance, who knew?  But this was the ship personally designed and built by the direct descendant of the man who invented Faster-Than-Light travel.  Nobody had seen man, or ship, for over three decades.  The discussions late at night often turned fantastical, with some postulating that perhaps the man had grown bored of this galaxy and had simply invented a drive to travel to the next, or perhaps a totally different universe?  All that was known was that the man had double-crossed High-Lord Lee Hyun-Woo, a fatal mistake at best.  Not known for his forgiving nature the High-Lord had sent his fleet to apprehend man and ship.  Surrounded on all sides by his enemies, with no way to escape, they had both simply—vanished, never to be seen again.

Yet here was the
Celeste
.  What was it doing?  How had it gotten here?  So caught up in the moment of discovery and like a kid who had wandered into a candy shop, I failed to consider that perhaps I wasn’t the only one that was proficient in the use of remote monitoring devices.  I failed to notice the frantic blinking red light, as I stepped aboard the ship for the first time.

*****

Had I not been disturbed, I think I would have happily spent days exploring that ship.  Sticking my head into every nook and cranny and, that was before I had even begun to dismantle everything, working out what made it tick.  For I had already observed several unrecognisable systems, when I was abruptly interrupted.

It’s a proven cliché to have a gun stuck in the back of your head and to hear the sound of it being cocked it sends a certain shudder down a person’s spine.  So I was somewhat relieved to
not
hear that sound; relief, that quickly evaporated, when instead a low-pitched hum started.  It quickly grew in pitch until it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.  Taking inordinate care not to make any sudden moves, I turned my head slowly, taking a good look round, finally able to make out the shape of a pistol—the likes of which I’d never seen before.

It appeared to be ridiculously delicate, even transparent, as if carved from the most fragile of glass.  My gaze was immediately drawn to the breech, or at least where the breech should have been, for instead there was a pulsating red glow.  My eyes became fixated on it, as the rhythm was almost hypnotic, beating in time to my own racing heart.  I’d never seen the likes of such a weapon before, but at once knew exactly what it was.  After all, my father had described it to me in exacting detail.