The Mandate of Heaven

by Mike Smith

  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.

  Chapter Two

  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. Sol
d 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.

  A fusion pistol.

  Built by Professor Alcubierre personally, only a few existed, all used exclusively by the High-Lords—the personal weapons of the Gods. Following the hand firmly grasping the pistol, I looked up, fully expecting to see one of those High-Lords standing before me, but instead found something far, far, worse.

  The disappointed face of my father.

  “Let me guess, you went looking for a late night snack and got lost?” he uttered wretchedly.

  *****

  “How did you know where I was?” I asked curiously several minutes later, after my father had directed me to a small room in the ship, where I found a table and several chairs. Ignoring my question, he pushed me down into one of the vacant seats, before taking a seat of his own, on the opposing side of the table. At least he had finally put away the pistol that he had been pointing at me, so I was fairly certain that he wasn’t going to shoot me, at least not yet.

  Giving me a frosty glare, instead of answering my question, he tossed something onto the table. It clattered onto the desk, the sudden crack making me jump in contrast to the still of the ship. Lowering my gaze to the object sitting on the table, I hesitantly picked it up, instantly recognising it as the picture that was sitting on his desk. This time, instead of the image of the unknown woman, it was displaying a schematic of the ship; with two profusely blinking red dots, the two of us, I assumed. I closed my eyes cursing my stupidity. Obviously the remote was from the ship and had immediately notified my father when I had stepped aboard.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” he mused, out loud. “Hence I assume that you already know about the remote?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know about the Celeste, I thought that it was the remote for a Superluminal Transmitter. That’s what I was looking for.”

  “The Celeste?” he asked confused.

  “The name of the ship.”

  “Céleste,” my father replied, rolling the name on his tongue. “So the Professor named it after his late wife, I can’t say I’m surprised.”

  “The Professor?” I replied, my turn to be confused.

  “Professor Henry Alcubierre,” he clarified.

  I could only stare at him. If he’d told me that he was actually a High-Lord in disguise, I would have been less surprised. “You know Professor Alcubierre?” I gasped.

  “I knew him.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “I certainly hope so,” my father replied absently, lost in t
he past. “After all it was me that buried him.”

  *****

  I trudged after my father in silence, as he refused to elaborate after making that startling announcement. I couldn’t get my head round it, that my father knew one of the greatest minds of the past few hundred years, or the fact that he had buried him.

  I didn’t realise how long it had been, before I looked up from the overgrown trail that my father had been following and noticed the darkness starting to recede. Dawn was fast approaching. My father meanwhile had come to a halt and I gathered that we must have arrived at our intended destination. He stepped around a large grey mausoleum, not giving it a second glance, but I instantly recognised it as the tomb of my father’s predecessor, Lord Greystone. He passed a couple more gravestones, before stopping in front of one set slightly back from the rest. This plot seemed to be better tended than the rest, with the grass cut back and few weeds or moss in sight. I realised that someone, my father I assumed, must have been maintaining this one. My eyes came to rest on the gravestone and as the sun slowly peeked above the horizon it cast its first rays upon the headstone, illuminating the dedication on it, and my mouth dropped open in amazement.

  Professor Henry Alcubierre, 2446 – 2509,

  Husband, and beloved, of Céleste Alcubierre,

  “Your only limit is your imagination.”

  “You did this?” I gasped, unable to believe that Alcubierre had been buried here all this time and I had never known. “How?” but I don’t think my father heard me as instead he was touching the headstone, his face raised to the first rays of the morning sun, his eyes closed and as those rays hit his face, I could see the glisten of tears on his eyelashes and for the first time wondered just what sort of relationship he’d had with Henry Alcubierre.

  For a long time my father was silent and I wondered if he’d even heard my question, when he started to speak. Slowly, hesitantly at first, but before long he was recounting their first meeting.