by Mike Smith
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.
Chapter Three
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.
“Hurry,” he ordered. “Stay with the ship until I come for you and whatever you do keep that book safe. If anything happens to me read it. It will answer all your questions.”
With those final words, the concealed entrance swung shut in my face and it was only in the dim light that I could finally see what rested in my hands—my father’s journal. He’d often stated that it was his life’s work, a small attempt at restitution for whatever crimes he’d committed in the past. I knew that he would never part with it, not while he still drew breath. Therefore, ignoring his edict, I frantically started to look for the release lever, to open the door. Only to find that the door would only open a crack as somehow my father had jammed it shut from the other side.
So I was only able to watch and observe, in horror, at the events that unfurled next.
*****
It could have only been a few minutes later when I heard barking, Lucifer I assumed. This was immediately followed by a loud crack of gunfire, followed by somebody crying out in pain. I would recognise my father’s voice anywhere and redoubled my efforts to open the door, but it would not budge.
I stilled a moment later when I heard footsteps on the other side of the door. Putting my eye to the small crack in the door, I could just make out the scene in my father’s study. He was the first to enter, stumbling, almost falling, while clutching a dark shape to his chest. I could just make out the still form of Lucifer, in his arms, as he gently laid him on the ground. My father looked up, back towards the entrance to his study, at something, or somebody, only he could see. The little light cast by the fireplace clearly illuminated his shocked expression and the deep gash on his forehead, blood trickling down his cheek, but he didn’t even seem to notice, instead all of his attention was focused towards the entrance.
“That wasn’t necessary!” he shouted. Fury burning in his eyes, visible even in the dim light of the room.
“I’m s
ure Lucas would disagree,” a rough voice replied, as another figure stepped out of the shadows into the room. I’d never seen him before, but would have recognised him anywhere. He was tall, about my height, with blond hair and blue eyes. He could have been considered handsome, were it not for the jagged gash running along the length of his face. Starting just under his eye it ran almost to his chin. The skin was puckered and raw, an old wound that had never healed properly.
My gaze followed his outstretched arm that was pointing to another man, Lucas I assumed, as he was nursing his hand. Even in the firelight I could see blood dripping from his wrist.
“Javier, I thought you said no names,” Lucas complained reproachfully, but Javier simply ignored him, continuing to stare intently at my father, with a gaze that bordered on the fanatical.
I could make out a further four others, as they each filed into the room, making six in total. They spread out until they formed a loose semi-circle with my father kneeling in front, bent over the still form of Lucifer. While I had never seen them before, they all looked similar; tall, muscular, with vacant expressions on their face. Men used to violence and long since immune to its ugliness. Even if their expressions didn’t give them away, the heavy weapons that each held in their hands were clear symbols of their intent. All wore some sort of body armour, which covered their upper bodies, arms and legs, leaving just their faces visible.
“Search him,” Javier ordered, motioning towards Lucas at his side. With his injury he was the only one without a weapon, although he had many close to hand.
Lucas carefully approached, taking care not to block the others field of fire and roughly pulled my father to his feet, pushing him back against the desk, carefully, but expertly frisking him. He stepped back a few minutes later with a quick shake of his head, returning to Javier’s side.