by Glenn Smith
Hansen closed his eyes and turned his face away. “Forgive me,” he whispered. Then he drew a long, deep breath, and squeezed the trigger.
Nick opened his tired eyes and squinted momentarily against the bright morning sunlight shining in through the large twin windows to his left, filling the living room—his living room, in his home in Colorado Springs. Actually, a few miles east of Colorado Springs, not too far from Solfleet’s Schriever Base, the former center of the United States Missile Defense Agency, which the old Solar Defense Command had taken over from the U.S. Aerospace Force and converted to its needs back when the existence of an operational space fleet finally made ground-based low-orbit missile defense systems obsolete. The point being that he knew exactly where he was. No need to lie there until he remembered—rather, no need to sit there until he remembered, as he had fallen asleep in his recliner. Either way, no need to ‘recover’ from the damn nightmares first. He’d had the nightmares, of course, as he did every night now, but at least he hadn’t bolted awake gasping for air this time. “My God,” he mumbled under his breath. “I’m actually getting used to them.”
At least he’d finally gotten some sleep. Several hours, judging by how bright the room was. Disturbed, haunted sleep perhaps, but sleep. Where that useless sleeping pill had failed, the soothing patter of the gentle rain had succeeded. He’d made Vandenhoven sufficiently nervous and told him what he wanted to know, and then walked into the living room and kicked back in the recliner... and listened to the rain. That was the last thing he remembered.
Except for the nightmares.
He looked to his right, through the open doorway into the kitchen and up at the clock mounted on the far wall. It was a few minutes after 6:00, which explained why the room was so bright. The sun was still low in the east, shining directly across the plains and straight in through all of the windows in the front of the house.
Heather would have gotten up by now. Soon she’d head off to school and he’d have the house to himself for the day. He’d be able to relax, truly relax, for the first time in a very long time. Geneva had been nice and he’d enjoyed spending a little free time with his daughter for a change—she’d been so happy to see Mirriazu again and had thoroughly enjoyed the Botanical Gardens, and it had done him good to see her so happy—but traveling and sightseeing could take a lot out of a person. Especially when that person found himself and his daughter being followed by several suspicious looking men. Today he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t feel like doing. Even the whole process of moving was behind him. The one benefit to having lost everything but the clothes on their backs when the Veshtonn destroyed Mandela Station was that he and Heather had very few personal belongings, which made the move relatively easy. With the movers’ help, and with the cooperation of one of the local furniture stores, they’d already refurnished the entire house and had finished unpacking what few belongings they did have—mostly just the clothes they’d bought to replace those they had lost—yesterday. He’d also bought himself a new sedan. Nothing remained to be done beyond adding their own aesthetic touches, such as bringing in some houseplants or hanging pictures, and they had all the time in the world to do that.
He heard a sound—a light, rhythmic, thump, thump, thump. Footsteps? Was that Heather coming downstairs already? Granted, having just moved back in after being away for so many years, he hadn’t yet had time to get used to all of the house’s creaks and groans, but it sounded like Heather coming down the stairs, and if it was Heather, she’d obviously gotten up a lot earlier than she’d intended. He looked toward the stairs, though he couldn’t see them from where he was sitting—he could only see the pale lime-green living room wall, and beyond the doorway the large, darkly stained oak front door and the first several feet of the foyer—but the footfalls that continued thumping through the foyer approaching the kitchen gave him his answer. Heather had come downstairs and was heading into the kitchen. He looked through that doorway again, and a second or two later she walked into the kitchen and crossed toward the refrigerator.
Wearing nothing but a pair of little purple panties.
“Heather!”
“Ah!” his daughter screeched, jumping and spinning toward him and throwing her arms across her chest and cupping her hands over her bare breasts before he’d even finished shouting her name, her eyes wide as saucers. “God damn it, Dad, don’t do that!” she protested You scared the living shit out of me!”
“First, watch your language when you talk to me,” he told her, ignoring the fact that he’d practically scared her right out of her skin. Then he asked her, “And second, what are you doing walking around the house like that?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were up already,” she answered, lowering her voice as she started to calm down.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” he told her sternly. “Why are you walking around the house half-naked?”
“I got hot last night, so I didn’t wear anything to bed” she explained.
Which meant that she’d just put those panties on before coming downstairs. He supposed he should be thankful that she’d at least done that much, though the ease with which she’d just admitted to sleeping in the nude troubled him a little. But, when it came to dealing with teenage daughters, a father had to choose his battles carefully—Mirriazu had taught him that years ago—and this was one battle in which he suspected he was going to have to give some ground. “What you wear or don’t wear to bed at night is your choice and your business,” he replied, giving her precisely that much, “but I want you to cover yourself when you leave your room. There are a lot of houses up here on this hillside and ours has a lot of large windows. Deal?”
“Fine,” she agreed. Then, when he just kept staring at her as though she hadn’t answered him yet, she added, “Okay, deal!” Then she finally turned with a huff and dropped her arms and walked over to the refrigerator. She took a glass down out of the overhead cabinet beside it, then opened the refrigerator and took out the pitcher of orange juice.
Nick gazed at his daughter as she filled her glass. Granted, her body had matured quickly after the onset of puberty a few years ago, but how could a girl look like that when she was only fifteen years old? Yes, he was her father and probably shouldn’t look at her in that way, but he would have had to be blind not to see it. While the scarcity of her years remained apparent in her youthful face, she seemed to be growing prettier and, dare he even think it, sexier by the day. Her long strawberry-blond hair, though still a bit mussed from sleep—she’d obviously just rolled out of bed—shone like satin in the sunlight, her piercing green eyes seemed to glisten like polished emeralds, and she had the curves of a young woman half a dozen years older—curves that drew the attentions of young men, as he’d witnessed in Geneva. He was going to have to start keeping closer tabs on her. Especially with summer coming.
“Coffee’s ready, Dad,” she told him as she put the pitcher back into the refrigerator and closed the door.
Nick sat up and retracted the footrest, then got up out of his recliner and walked into the kitchen just in time to glimpse Heather’s back as she walked out through the other doorway. “I don’t want to see you outside your room like that again, Heather,” he told her.
“I heard you the first time, Dad,” she replied as she started back up the stairs, her footfalls seemingly louder than before, though she wasn’t actually stomping up the stairs. She might have put forth a lot of effort to turn herself around over the last several months, but she obviously had not done a full one-eighty quite yet.
He grabbed his new favorite coffee mug—the black and tan ceramic one with the United Earth Federation banner emblazoned on one side, the gold, silver, and bronze Solfleet insignia badge on the other, and the words ‘HONORABLY RETIRED’ stenciled below both, which he’d bought at the Schriever exchange yesterday—and poured himself a hot, fresh cup of coffee, then stood right there leaning back against the edge of the counter and gazing into the foyer as he t
ook a tentative sip. Hot was right. Too hot. Much too hot to drink.
What was he going to do with her, he wondered as he carefully set his mug down on the counter? A father had to choose his battles carefully. So how much parental intervention would be too much? How tightly could he squeeze before she’d try to slip through his fingers? She really had come a long way in a relatively short period of time, and her efforts deserved to be rewarded in some tangible way, not marginalized. The last thing he wanted to do was push her too hard, make her think that he didn’t appreciate those efforts, and risk encouraging her to give up trying. But at the same time, her attitude of indifference toward running around half-naked in front of him, or in places like the kitchen where other people might see her through the windows concerned him. Somehow, he needed to encourage her to adopt a more modest mind-set without coming on too strong.
If he only knew how to do that.
A clear but non-intrusive tone sounded through the house for one second, fell silent for two seconds, and then sounded for one second more. The home’s communications and security system then announced in its soothing feminine voice, “Incoming call.”
“I’ll take it in the den,” Nick responded.
He took his coffee with him and locked the den door behind him, then sat down at his desk and tapped his terminal awake. “Answer call.”
Vandenhoven’s image instantly filled the monitor. He looked even more annoyed than he had a few hours ago, and he looked to his left and then to his right before he spoke, as though he were afraid that someone might be listening in. “So it took me a few hours, Admiral, but I got the answers you wanted,” he finally said, not bothering to say ‘hello’ first.
Curious that he still called him ‘Admiral,’ though. Force of habit, perhaps. “What do you have for me?” Nick asked him, not at all bothered by his decision not to exchange pleasantries with him. They’d never exactly been friends, after all.
“Probably nothing you don’t already know, sir, but I’ll tell you anyway,” Vandenhoven answered. Then he dropped his gaze to his desktop, presumably to read from whatever notes he’d kept. “Do the records still show that the Excalibur was destroyed in twenty-one sixty-eight? Yes they do. Did all the people assigned to the Mars Orbital Shipyards at that time die within the next three years? No.” He looked up and explained, “Not all the people, but an extraordinarily high percentage of them did die within three years, yes, sir. Some of them under very mysterious circumstances.” He dropped his gaze again. “Is Crewman Stefani O’Donnell still listed ‘missing in action’ after being abducted by persons still unidentified? Yes. Is Commander Elizabeth Royer still dead?” He paused for a moment, licked his lips and swallowed, then answered, “Yes.” He paused again, drew a breath and let it out, then concluded, “And finally, were the Portal and the entire research facility on Window World completely destroyed in a Veshtonn attack? Yes.” He looked up once more and asked, not without a fair helping of sarcasm, “Will there be anything else... Admiral?”
“No, Lieutenant Commander, there won’t be,” Nick answered evenly, letting the younger man’s sarcasm go unchallenged. “I know you took a big risk to get me some of those answers. I appreciate that. Thank you.”
“Like you gave me a choice in the matter,” the annoyed younger man commented. Then the monitor screen went black. Vandenhoven had closed the channel.
Nick tapped his terminal to put it to sleep and then got up and carried his coffee back into the kitchen. He paused by the sliding door that led out onto the lower back deck and took a sip—it was still pretty hot but had cooled enough to drink—then considered whether or not to change out of his pajamas before he went outside. He quickly decided not to bother. After all, this was his home and his pajamas covered him as well as any of his regular clothes would. He tapped the button to open the door.
He knew, of course, that it had rained for a while last night, but he hadn’t thought to pull on his slippers before he stepped outside. The wooden deck slats felt damp beneath his bare feet there in the shadow of the upper deck above him, but looking ahead and to the right where the larger lower deck extended beyond that shadow, he could see that the part of the deck bathed in sunlight had already dried. He walked forward, into the sunlight—he felt the increased warmth on his back immediately—sipped his coffee once more, then again, and then set his mug down atop the wide railing.
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky that he could see. Bright sunlight bathed the front range from north of Pikes Peak southward to Cheyenne Mountain and beyond, highlighting dozens of minor peaks and narrow draws and other contours along its length that he couldn’t be sure he’d ever seen before. Interesting how the angle and intensity of the sun could make the mountains look so different from one hour to the next. A fresh thin layer of snow covered a good portion of the otherwise bare brown rock above Pikes Peak’s tree line, looking almost as though someone had sprinkled talcum powder over it—more than the faint traces of white that spotted the Spanish Peaks more than a hundred miles to the south, but not nearly as much as that which blanketed the entire, far more distant range to the southwest. Funny. From where he stood it looked like the only things that lay between his house and Pikes Peak were the gently rolling hills below and the few hundred more houses that decorated them. No one visiting the Springs for the first time ever would have guessed that several more miles of homes and the entire city of Colorado Springs stood between him and that mountain, which itself actually stood another ten miles beyond the city’s west side.
He picked his mug up off the railing and sipped his coffee again, then exhaled slowly. If nothing had changed as Vandenhoven’s answers seemed to indicate, then what had Graves done since he arrived in the past, besides scratch a message into a Philadelphia sidewalk? He hadn’t prevented the Excalibur’s destruction. Nor had he saved all those people’s lives or done anything else sufficient to change the course of the timeline. Or had he? Unfortunately, that same nagging question remained. If he had done something significant, and if that action had caused changes to occur, would they see evidence of those changes in the present or would those changes only exist along a new timeline, as Professor Verne’s favorite theory had suggested?
Questions. Nothing but questions. He took another mouthful of coffee and paused for a few seconds to stop thinking and just savor the flavor before he swallowed.
And then it dawned on him. The answer to that question had been staring him right in the face the whole time! He’d already seen evidence of change in the present! Graves’ message itself was change! That message hadn’t been in the sidewalk before because Graves hadn’t been there to scratch it in! That proved his actions in the past had an effect on the present! How significant that effect might be remained to be seen, but at least now he had solid evidence, and that added credence to the ‘cause and effect’ argument in at least two areas so far.
First there was the fact that although the agency’s intelligence had indicated humankind would not survive another Veshtonn invasion, they had survived. The idea that they originally hadn’t and that Graves’ actions had changed that outcome was a much more viable theory now. And of course, second, there were his nightmares, first with Harkam’s daughter talking in death thanks to Heather trying to wake him up once while he dreamed, then with Graves replacing the security police sergeant who’d really been there, and then more recently with both—the oddest iteration yet. Perhaps now that he’d gone back in time, Graves really had gone aboard Harkam’s vessel as the sergeant in charge of the security police team.
Unfortunately, that couldn’t explain why Nick still remembered the other security police sergeant being killed, making him the sole survivor. If Graves had replaced the other sergeant aboard the vessel and had survived as well, then Nick shouldn’t be able to recall the details of the incident in any other way. It didn’t make sense, and that led him right back to where he’d started.
He must have been subjected to a memory-edit at sometime, somewhere. He
must have. There simply wasn’t any other viable explanation.
He heard the sliding door open behind him and looked back over his shoulder as Heather stepped outside, already showered and dressed, ready to go. Had he really been standing outside on the deck that long? She’d put on a short black skirt, a light blue satin button-down blouse that pulled slightly across her bosom, just enough to draw a little more attention to her... assets... than he would have preferred, and knee-high blue suede boots. She’d also made herself up, and Nick had to admit, even if only in his mind, that she’d done a good job of it. She hadn’t overdone it the way some girls tended to, and what she had done enhanced her natural beauty, rather than cover it up.
“I’m going, Dad,” she told him as she stepped up to his side.
“Okay.” He put an arm around her and kissed the top of her head. “Have a good day.”
“You, too,” she replied automatically. Then, looking up at him through those puppy dog eyes that she was so good at making, she added, “I really am sorry about earlier.”
“That’s all right, Heather,” he heard himself say before he could think of a better reply. To him that made it sound as though what she’d done was no big deal, so he quickly explained what he meant by adding, “Just remember what I told you. Your room, your rules, but when you leave your room make sure you conform to my rules.”
“I got it, Dad. Bye.”
“Bye.”
Nick watched her walk back inside—his eyes did fall to her backside, but only to satisfy his father’s need to be aware—then turned with a sigh to face the mountains once more. Like it or not, he had to face facts. His little girl was becoming a woman. A beautiful and shapely, sexy young woman. And at her age her hormones were probably totally out of whack, and by now she was likely exploring her sexuality on some level as well, though he really didn’t want to think about that. One thing was for sure, though. The boys were going to be all over her... figuratively speaking. Then again, now that he thought about it, perhaps not so figuratively speaking. He’d been a teenage boy himself once upon a time. He knew how they thought and what they tended to think with more often than not. He knew what they wanted.
