The Mandate of Heaven (7 page)

Shrugging my shoulders, not completely understanding the reason behind the request, but complying nonetheless, I threw the rock in the direction of the ship.  It was a good throw, striking the ship squarely amidships—or it should have.

Instead it passed cleanly through.

I could only stare, speechless, observing the rock strike the far wall, on the other side of the room.  Only then did it hit me.  There was no other entrance, or exit, to the cavern apart from the small corridor that we had just entered by.

So
how
had the ship got here, and just
where
had it gone?

I would find out the next day when my father explained just what Professor Henry Alcubierre had invented, but that explanation had to wait, as I had already fainted dead away.

I, of course, blamed it on my lack of sleep the night before.

*****

“A fusion reactor?  That’s impossible,” I vehemently disagreed.

“You use that term so confidently,” my father sighed.  “Who are you to say what is possible and what is not?”

“I’ve seen a fusion reactor.  It’s hard to miss, what with it being a few hundred feet tall and all.”

My father and I had been having this same argument for the last few hours, ever since he had first explained to me how the ship worked.  While he wasn’t an engineer and didn’t know all the details, he had worked closely with the Professor for several months.  The basic principal was similar to the Alcubierre FTL drive. The
Celeste
was fitted with one, but instead of being surrounded by a negative-energy field, it moved into one of the other thirteen dimensions of super-string theory. This was identical to our own, but where time flowed at a different pace, moving the ship slightly out of phase, that infinitesimal tick between the second hand of a clock.  From the perspective of a person observing the ship from this reality—it simply vanished.

“The shielding alone to contain the reaction would be hundreds of feet thick, and that doesn’t even include the cooling systems required for the superconductors to maintain the integrity of the magnetic containment shell.”

“So what you’re saying is that you cannot build a self-contained fusion reactor, less than a hundred feet in diameter, correct?” my father asked.

“Absolutely.”

“I see,” my father smirked.  In the blink of an eye he smoothly drew the fusion pistol, which I hadn’t even noticed him carrying, the beam surging forward and striking a tree, several metres distant, dead centre.

“Then I guess that’s also impossible, as it’s powered by an even smaller, micro-fusion reactor,” my father grinned.

Leaving me standing in the middle of our lawn, mouth agape, staring at the perfectly round hole, over an inch in diameter, cut cleanly all the way through the ancient tree trunk.

*****

“So who is she?” I prompted my father one evening, a few days later.  I had requested permission to look around the
Celeste
, which my father had agreed to, in that maddeningly dismissive way of his, pointing out that the ship belonged to me now, just as much as him.  The indifferent attitude, a father agreeing for his child to go ahead and play with his newest toy, had put me in a foul mood for most of the day.  The fact that I made little progress trying to glean the inner workings of the ship, even after twelve hours tinkering away, had hardly helped matters.  Looking back on that day, I wonder perhaps if that was why I pushed him just as far as I did.

“Nobody to concern yourself with,” my father said, ignoring me completely and continuing to scribble into his journal.

“Oh, come on,” I cried out loud.  “It’s not as if you don’t know about all my conquests.”

“You’re not still sore about Elizabeth refusing to kiss you in tenth grade are you?” he looked up at me with a raised eyebrow, “as you really need to get over that.”

Grinding my teeth together in frustration, wondering if he would ever forget that incident, I snapped back irritably.  “It’s just that you know
everything
about me and I know so
little
about you.  It’s only by accident that I found out that you knew Professor Alcubierre and that you’ve got his damn spaceship secreted in our basement!”

My father cast me a stern glance at the use of my profanity, but obviously decided to let it slip, just this once, as he must have observed something in my expression.  Instead he turned back to his journal, which only incensed me further.

“An ex-girlfriend?” I needled him, but while his pen slowed momentarily, he deliberately went back to ignoring me.

“A spurned lover, perhaps?” I continued to goad him, failing to notice his body tensing, the grip on his pen increasing until his fingers were almost white from the strain.

“Your mistress then,” I smirked.  “What did she do, toss you over for somebody else?” I paused for a moment, before adding nastily.  “Her husband, perhaps?”

While I was hoping to get some sort of reaction out of him, it wasn’t the one I expected.  For before I could blink he was suddenly standing in front of me, his forearm pressing painfully into my throat, cutting off my airway.  I immediately started to choke, unable to draw oxygen into my lungs.  I tried pushing back against him, but I could find no purchase, as I found myself slammed against a bookshelf, my feet dangling some inches from the ground.

It was the expression on his face that so took me aback; it was like nothing I’d ever seen before, devoid of any emotion, lifeless and empty.  His eyes, normally a warm brown had darkened until they appeared almost pitch black.  Suddenly all those stories from my childhood about this man, a killer, came rushing back.  This time I well believed them, for the man standing in front of me was a total stranger—and seemed more than capable of murder.

“Don't ever mention her like that again,” he whispered chillingly.  “You don’t have the right.  You know nothing about her, or what she was like.  Of anybody, she is the least deserving of your scorn.  Call me whatever you like, I probably deserve it and far worse, but you never disrespect her like that again.”  With that my father dropped me to the floor turning his back on me.

But I always had to have the last word, it was my greatest failing, and before I’d even consciously thought about it, the words were already tumbling from my lips.  “How can I mention her? I don’t even know the whore’s name—” I never even saw his fist, it seemingly came out of nowhere, but I certainly felt it.  My jaw exploded in pain and already unsteady on my feet, I stumbled back into the bookshelf and it was only this that stopped me collapsing to the floor.

“If it was anybody else—” my father shook his head furiously.  “I would have killed them for that.”

With those words still ringing in my head, he left, leaving me bruised, shaken and wondering what the hell had just happened.

Who was this woman?

*****

The brief, and very one-sided argument with my father, simply left me even more determined to find out what I wanted to know.  When he had left his study he had purposefully taken the remote with him, perhaps guessing at what I might have attempted.  In his fury, however, he had forgotten the simple fact that it was a remote to something else, completely superfluous if you happened to have physical access to that device, which I did, my father having granted me full access to the ship, a few days earlier.

So still nursing my wounded jaw, and pride, I stepped through the hidden door of his study, taking me only a few minutes to arrive at the
Celeste
.  This time my first action was to cancel any remote monitoring, so my father had no idea what I was doing.  Then I sat down in the cockpit, activating the main computer.  It only took me a few seconds to find her pictures again.  This time when I came to the end of the file, I was prompted to search for others, but dismissed the warning.  Instead I instructed the computer to use the pictures for a far-reaching search, far beyond just this System, to search out across the complete corporate extranet.  I naïvely dismissed any and all warnings about the cost; who cared?  My father could foot the bill.  It would be suitable recompense for my wounded pride.

I also dismissed any and all warnings that the other corporations could monitor such activity.  Who cared about some woman that my father was still obsessing over, thirty years later?

It was just another step along a path that was eventually to have fatal consequences.

The network connection ran over a Faster-Than-Light link, but even then it was horrendously slow and I sat there for ages, literally on the edge of the pilot’s seat, as the results slowly started to trickle back.  My biggest fear was that the search result would come back negative, that she was some insignificant, unrecognisable person, lost amongst the billions of others, special only to my father.  That was obviously not the case, as the results started to flood in and I soon had a name to go with the picture—Lady Jessica Hadley, eldest daughter of High-Lord Hadley.  My eyebrows disappeared into my forehead at this startling discovery.  As this was no distant relation to some minor Lord or Lady.  With no other family, except for a younger sister, she would have inherited most, if not all, of her father’s domain.  I could barely get my head around the mind-boggling concept of my father ever inheriting such wealth and power.

The responsibility however, wouldn’t be a problem, I thought snidely.

Curious to discover the present whereabouts of Lady Hadley, I expanded my search, only to discover my second big shock of the day—she was dead; having died almost thirty years ago.  The dates suddenly clicked in my head, no wonder my father looked at her picture so wistfully; he hadn’t left her, or her him, instead she had died!  A fist suddenly clamped around my heart and squeezed, remembering the words that I had spoken to my father, barely an hour before.  I felt the worst kind of scoundrel and realised that I owed him a sincere apology.

But before I did that I had one last question to satisfy my curiosity.  How had she died?  An accident?  Illness?  Although I remembered my father telling me that the High-Lords and their direct descendants had genetically improved immune systems, making them resistant to almost all known viruses and diseases.

This time the results came back in a torrent, with words leaping out of the screen at me.

Murdered.

Lone assassin.

Never caught.

Unsolved mystery.

There was a single, blurred, photograph of the assassin attached and I watched open-mouthed as it slowly rendered on the screen, pixel-by-pixel, line-by-line, until I was finally staring at the complete image.

In horror.

For while the image was indistinct, obviously taken at night with the assassin partly in shadow, his face was clearly visible.  I recognised it instantly, after all it was a face that I was intimately familiar with, looking back at me, every day in the mirror.

For the face was my very own.

For many years it was just my father and I.  He protected me and taught me right from wrong.  He was my sun and my moon, the centre of my universe.

For over twenty-five years he raised me, alone, never asking for anything in return.  It’s long overdue that I repay this debt.

—Michael Greystone

The shock must have caused my brain to short circuit for a couple of minutes, because it took me that long to start thinking clearly again.  The picture had been taken over thirty years earlier, I hadn’t even been born by then, so it could hardly be me, even though the likeness was surreal.

It had often been remarked that I had a strong likeness to my father, especially from his younger days and it was this that planted the first tendril of thought in my head.  For it could hardly be a coincidence, the assassin being a spitting image of my father, while he had a picture of this victim on his desk.  I frantically scrolled forward, looking for some hint or clue as to
why
?  It didn’t take me long to establish a motive as the name practically leapt off the screen.

High-Lord Stanton.

At the time of her death she had been engaged to marry the man.  A man my father detested with such single-mindedness that it bordered on an obsession.  Remembering my earlier cutting remark about her going back to her husband and the reaction from my father, suddenly everything clicked into place, making sense.

My father had found out about the impending nuptials and had begged her to break off the engagement. When she refused, he had shot her in a fit of jealousy.  To forever deny his hated rival her hand in marriage.  For as long as I could remember I looked up to my father, placing him on a pedestal and viewing him as some sort of paragon, a moral compass that I could admire and try to emulate.  I couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Instead he was a liar—and murderer.

Distraught, I wiped any trace of the search from the computer before switching it off and turning off all the lights behind me, as I departed.  Leaving the ship dark, surrounded on all sides by lengthening shadows.  I headed for my own bed, not knowing what to do or say next, simply determined that I would avoid my father at all costs.  I had no idea how to look him in the eye the next time I saw him, to hide the terrible truth that I now knew.

Unbeknown to me, as I was heading for my bed, many, many light-years distant others were being roused from theirs.  For previously, over thirty years ago, software agents had been tasked with monitoring the very files that I had just accessed.  Infinitely patient, constantly diligent, they had waited all these years, sure in the knowledge that someone, somewhere knew the man that their master sought.  As thirty years ago, somebody had fatally underestimated the man and had only sent one assassin.

Since then they had learned from that mistake and this time an entire team was assembled, over a dozen in total.  Their task still remained the same.

Find him.

Silence him.

Forever.

*****

In the end I settled on the coward’s way out and simply avoided my father.  It wasn’t hard to do as he hardly sought out my company and I spent all my free time in the
Celeste
.  Meanwhile I had turned my attention to the cloaking device, having finally accepted my father’s, very compelling point, that the ship did indeed have a miniature fusion reactor.  I quickly discovered that the cloak worked on a very similar principal to the Alcubierre Drive.  Still, while testing it, I quickly discovered the very curious side effect that my father had noticed so many years before.

I noticed that after using the cloak for some time my watch was always off by several minutes.  The very first time I saw this was when I sat down to dinner with my father—thirty minutes late.  It was a long, tense meal with few words spoken, not helped in any way by my tardiness.  I wasn’t the only one relieved when it finally came to an end. 

Unlike my father, who simply shrugged and tossed away yet another timepiece, I was curious enough to investigate further.  I soon realised that the ‘lost-time’ was directly proportional to the time that I spent inside the ship, with the cloak running.  Practical experimentation demonstrated a time loss co-efficient of thirty-to-one, so for every thirty minutes that I spent with the cloak activated, one additional minute was mysteriously being lost.  Coincidently, I had come across just such a co-efficient a few days earlier, when investigating the power converter to the Alcubierre Field, which was set to exactly the same co-efficient.  Half a dozen experiments later, adjusting this power conversation ratio, proved the relationship.

Of course time dilation was a well-known phenomenon.  First discovered at the end of the Twentieth Century on Earth with accurate atomic clocks and space travel.  This was further refined after the invention of fusion power and the early sub-light multi-generation colony ships that left the Sol System.  Time passed much more slowly for the crew when travelling at close to the speed of light.  This resulted in huge generation gaps in some family trees, with great-great grandparents far younger than their descendants.

Causing major headaches when trying to record family genealogy.

But I had already discarded time dilation, after all I hadn’t gone anywhere and time dilation was directly related to velocity, hence it couldn’t apply.  Instead, it seemed that time was simply passing at a different rate, approximately one-thirtieth faster for me, compared with any observer outside the modified Alcubierre Field.

This supported Professor Alcubierre’s explanation to my father that the ship moved to a different dimension, one where time passed at a different rate. This raised the tantalising possibility that if I could move forwards in time, possibly I could move backwards?  It had long been known that you could invert an Alcubierre Field, not that anyone had ever wanted to do so.

After all, who wanted to go
backwards
at the speed of light?

Oblivious to any possible risk, I inverted the field, before re-engaging it.  Nothing seemed to happen.  Instead I was forced to bear an agonising thirty minute wait, so that the effect would be pronounced enough to be measurable.

After the seemingly endless wait, I practically sprinted from the ship to the first clock that I could find, an ancient, wound-up, Grandfather clock that rested in the hall.  It was called this as it was a tall, freestanding, weight-driven, pendulum clock.  I could practically feel each second drifting away, with the swift backwards and forwards motion of the swinging pendulum.  Anyone who has ever said they had no concept of time should stand in front of one of those clocks for a while.

One glance at the old Roman numerals on the clock face and I danced a jig of delight in front of that ancient timepiece.  Surely I was the only person to ever travel backwards in time?

The first ever human Chrononaut.

However, as the euphoria started to wear off I looked around strangely, as surely something should have felt different? But of course it wasn’t, the only thing that had changed was that my watch was exactly one minute behind the clock I was standing in front of.

*****

Three days later though I was despondent and totally disheartened.  Time travel?  It was overrated.  Nothing as fantastical as described in science-fiction books.  Going back in time to meet yourself.  Forget it, you can’t, as you’d already
left
.  Want to pick those winning lottery numbers?  Not possible, for they wouldn’t be the same.  Go back and change your past?  Impossible, because it was no longer the past, but now the present.

It turned out that time travel, just like time dilation, was
all
relative.

For when you changed something, turning left instead of right, then you created a whole new time-line and that future was just as uncertain.  As for the so-called grandfather paradox, going back in time and shooting yourself—seriously, why would you ever want to do that?

“I take it that you’ve figured everything out then, son?”

The voice of my father interrupted my depressed musings and I looked up in surprise, wondering what my father was doing on the ship and, more importantly, if he also happened to read minds.

“Almost,” I replied cautiously, not totally sure of his meaning.

Meanwhile, my father continued to shuffle around, uncomfortable on his feet, his hands stuck firmly in his pockets, as his gaze skirted around the inside of the ship.  Only then did it strike me that this was only the second time I had seen him inside the ship—the first, of course, being when he had caught me, red-handed, skulking around.

“Why don’t we retire to my study? I think it’s long overdue that we had a talk.  I’ll get us something to drink and the fire going.  It’ll be much warmer there than here.” He must have noticed the sceptical look on my face, as the on-board climate control kept the inside of the ship at a perfect twenty-three degrees centigrade.  “Too many ghosts from the past, son.  It gives me chills just thinking about stepping aboard this ship,” he shuddered.

*****

“I’m sorry for hurting you,” my father started off, before I’d even taken a seat.  “It was certainly never my intention.  My past is painful and that’s why I rarely ever talk about it.  I avoid discussing it as much as possible, mostly to try and forget.  Anyway, I wanted to protect you, just as much as myself, you know what they say about the sins of the father, but I can understand why you’re curious—”

“Did you love her?” I blurted out, surprising me, just as much as it did him.

“I don’t know,” my father scratched his head, obviously embarrassed talking about such personal feelings.  “It’s strange you know, you think you know everything about a person, yet they can still surprise you.”

“Is that your justification?” I muttered darkly, refusing to look him in the eye, instead staring at the glass held tightly in my grasp.  “She took you by surprise?”

“She certainly did at that,” my father chuckled, unconsciously rubbing his nose.

I think it was his laugh that infuriated me the most.  How could he sit there, behind his desk with her picture resting in front of him and find her death amusing?  I shot to my feet, as if my chair had suddenly caught fire, unable to restrain my temper any longer.

“How can you sit there, laughing?” I screamed, smashing the glass in my hands against the floor.  The blood-red wine ran across the carpet in rivulets, looking so much like blood that I could easily imagine it being hers.  I pounded on his desk with both hands, fists clenched in rage, trying to shake the image from my head.  I was in such a fury that both pictures on his desk went tumbling to the floor.  “You killed her!”

My father’s face turned pallid and he fell back against his chair and was still.  For a moment I thought I’d actually killed him.

“How did you know?” he gasped, his voice trembling.

“It wasn’t difficult,” I sneered contemptuously glancing at the remote, which was now lying face down on the floor.  “No wonder you rarely go out and never entertain visitors; your face must be the most recognisable in the Imperium.”

My father followed my gaze towards the remote and his eyes suddenly opened wide in understanding—and horror.

“What have you done?”

“I don’t know what bothers me the most,” I continued regardless, ignoring his question.  “The fact that you never told me what happened, that you
lied
to me about it or the fact that
you
killed her.”  With that I clamped my jaw shut, grinding my teeth together in frustration.

The two of us stood barely a foot apart, my father still reclining in his chair, mouth agape, with me towering over him, leaning half across the desk.  He seemed lost for words.  The silence felt like it stretched into eternity, it went on and on, but was abruptly shattered when he finally found his voice.

“I never killed any—” he started to reply indignantly, but whatever he was going to say next was lost when a booming echo sounded throughout the house.   Once, twice, three times.  The sound was so unexpected that it took us both by surprise, taking us a moment longer to even realise what it was.  Somebody was banging on the front door.  By the sound of the booming echoes he or she must have been hitting it with a battering ram.  I could count on one hand how many times we had guests come to stay, and this late at night?

Never.

If it was possible, my father seemed to turn even paler, looking first at me, then the remote still upturned on the floor. Finally he glanced in the direction of the entrance hall where the source of the banging was coming from.  He seemed momentarily racked by indecision, glancing at me one more time, before finally getting to his feet.

The abrupt movement forced me to take a step back and by the time I had recovered he was already around the desk, passing me something in his outstretched hand.  He deposited it in my hands before I even had a chance to glance at it.

“Keep this safe,” he ordered curtly, in a tone that I’d never heard him use with me before. With such a note of ringing command I found myself automatically obeying, tightly grasping the object to my chest.  Still off-balance, wondering what was going on, I found myself being pushed backwards, in the direction of the concealed entrance in his study.  Before I could even ask what was going on, he pushed me through the open portal.