The Mandate of Heaven

by Mike Smith

  “Well, won’t they be surprised when we all walk out of here, alive and well,” Alex mused out loud. “We just need a distraction, to keep the initiative…”

  “You can’t be serious,” Jessica spluttered. “You heard what Caruso said, that they’ve got an entire company outside.”

  “Hmmm, helpful of him, to give us that bit of tactical intelligence,” Alex reasoned, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “That way we can count the bodies at the end and make sure we’ve got every last one of them.”

  “There’s only five of us, we can’t take them all on.”

  “Five of us?” Alex looked up, surprised.

  “Well yes, I suppose, I mean, you’re all doing this to help me. So I think I should help you out, in return.”

  Alex looked at her with a puzzled expression then, as awareness dawned, he tipped his head back and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” she muttered.

  “While I appreciate the offer of help,” Alex smirked, patronisingly. “It really isn’t necessary. You see Templeton, Baracoa and Murdoch didn’t just come here for the decor, but instead for the company. Specifically, because this is the preferred watering hole for what was Easy Company, 1st Battalion the 104th, Space Marine Regiment.

  “Was? Why? What happened to them?”

  “Didn’t you hear?” Alex smiled, but the laughter didn’t reach his eyes, which glittered with a sudden, frightening intensity. “High-Lord Stanton accused us all of treason and sedition, we were all dishonourably discharged, and in absence, sentenced to death.”

  “But you said that you didn’t know High-Lord Stanton,” Jessica objected.

  “I said that I didn’t know him well,” Alex disagreed. “That doesn’t exclude the fact that I knew him well enough, to put a gun to his head and pull the trigger.”

  *****

  Having slipped outside, to avoid the need for further explanations, Alex shook his head in bemusement. The expression on Jessica’s face had almost been worth the pain of recalling the memories, ones he’d thought long dead and buried. But those paled in comparison to the physical wounds he still carried, the chest wound still ached in such cold, damp weather.

  It made him miss Arcturus even more, as while he’d spent almost two decades of his life, here, on Capella, he no longer called it home. The risk of being back here was too great, especially once Stanton caught wind of his presence—he would turn the planet upside down looking for him. For Alex had injured the man’s pride, and there was no more mortal wound that one could inflict on another, than that.

  He’d only taken a dozen steps, when he heard a flurry of footsteps behind him. Fortunately, the thick fog, now mingled with the remnants from the earlier smoke grenades, offered him plenty of cover as he ducked into an enclosed alleyway. He withdrew his fusion pistol, taking care to keep it concealed under his jacket, to stop the pulsating glow from revealing his presence. As the footsteps passed the mouth of the passageway, Alex stepped forward, catching the shadow by the arm and, using his forward momentum, he pivoted, swinging the person around in a parabolic arc, straight into the wall—only to find himself being jerked off his feet and dragged into the alley right behind his pursuer.

  “Stop messing around!” Jessica snapped, peering round the corner to make sure that nobody had observed their altercation. “Anybody could hear you coming from a mile away.”

  “Not everyone shares your enhanced hearing,” Alex replied surly. “Nor your enhanced strength,” he added, rubbing his painful shoulder. “What are you doing here anyway? I told you to stay with Sanderson and Garrett.”

  “If you think I’m going to allow you to run off and get yourself killed, after dropping that bombshell, you’ve got another thing coming.”

  “Women,” Alex snapped. “What is it with you, always wanting to discuss every last detail to death?” He turned to pull away from her, back in the direction that he’d been heading.

  “Wait. Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m about to go and commit serious crimes against High-Lord Stanton, your fiancé, remember?” Alex breathed out in frustration. “It’s likely to involve assault, grievous bodily harm, destruction to property and, most probably, mass homicide, all fully premeditated, I assure you. Trust me when I say that you don’t want to know the details. That way you can truthfully plead ignorance, when you finally get around to marrying him. That is unless I shoot him first,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Wait,” Jessica repeated, clamping her hand firmly around his forearm, anchoring him to her.

  “By the High Lords,” Alex cursed. “Unless this is a declaration of undying love, before I step out there, risking life-and-limb, in which case please proceed, can’t we discuss this later. It’s not a declaration of undying love, is it?”

  “What? No!” Jessica exclaimed, wide-eyed in shock. “I just wanted to thank you.”

  “Come to think of it, I can spare a minute for this. God forbid I go and die, then have to spend the rest of eternity wondering what it is you wanted to thank me for.”

  “I wanted to thank you for saving my life,” she said hurriedly.

  “Which time in particular?” Alex replied, with a faintly comical expression. “There have been several occasions.”

  “Back at home. On Osiris,” she quickly clarified. “That man would’ve killed me, had you not been there.”

  “Oh, you mean that time, when I snuck into your bedroom. My motives weren’t completely altruistic, you know?” He took a step closer, until they were face-to-face, almost touching. “Especially when you challenged me to kiss you,” he added, glancing down at her lips meaningfully.

  “Fine,” Jessica rolled her eyes. “I promised you a kiss, and nobody can accuse us Hadley’s of not repaying our debts.” With that she brought a finger to her lips, touching them and then leant forward, putting the same finger to Alex’s lip.

  “Ouch,” Alex frowned, forgetting the bloody lip that Garrett had given him not half an hour before. “That hurt.”

  “Poor baby,” Jessica laughed, but the sound died in her throat, as her gaze was drawn to her finger, still touching his swollen and bloody lip, and she rubbed it up and down, smearing the blood across his lips. Withdrawing her finger, she seemed mesmerized by the sight of her now bloody fingertip. Lifting her head, she looked Alex in the eye as she leaned forward and inserted the finger between her lips. Swirling her tongue around the digit, still warm with his blood, she licked it clean.

  Something dark and carnal flared inside Alex, and his gaze darkened as it was drawn to her mouth, her finger still inside its warm, moist cavern.

  With a pop her finger reappeared and shrugging nonchalantly she said, “That’s how we usually kiss on Osiris.”

  One moment she was looking up at him with an impish smile and the next he’d swooped down and caught her mouth. Hard, with no mercy. She gasped at the shock. He ground his mouth against her soft lips. She felt his teeth, tasted his hot tongue mixed with the texture of his blood, and that part of her which was desperate to escape from her fate, broke free and ran wild. Revelling in his savagery. Rejoicing in his blunt masculinity.

  Completely out of her control.

  Until he raised his head and looked down at her. His lips were wet and slightly reddened, but otherwise he showed no sign of that devastating kiss. She tried to pull back from his grasp, but his hands held strong.

  “You are such an enigma. A contradiction wrapped in a mystery,” he murmured, examining her from beneath half-lowered eyelids. “So wasted on Stanton, who will never look at you as anything but his prize. To be put on the shelf along with all of his other trophies.”

  “I am not,” she whispered, horrified at the mere notion.

  “Still you continue to insist on this path you’ve taken. I wonder why?” He raised his eyebrows questioningly and let her go so suddenly she stumbled back a step. “That’s how we usually kiss on Arcturus,” he said, smirking. “I find our way far more, satisfying.�
� He managed to make the very word sound sensual, dark with erotic connotations.

  Then with a final smile, he turned round and vanished into the night.

  No longer able to support her own weight, Jessica slumped against the nearest wall, uncaring that the filth, clinging to the dank brickwork, was now seeping through her cloak. She was desperate for air, filling her lungs with great gulps of it, as once again darkness hovered at the very edge of her periphery and she had to wait several moments for her vision to clear. She wiped the back of her hand against her brow, surprised to find her skin hot to the touch, damp with sweat. Either she was coming down with some sort of fever, unlikely considering she had never been ill in her life, or that had been one soul-destroying kiss, to affect her so badly.

  *****

  He was a creature of the night, unfit for the company of others.

  The gloom of the night enveloped Alex as he strode rapidly away. He leapt over the stinking channel that ran down the middle of the street and turned down another smaller lane, circling back around, towards where he’d first started out from. A shadow moved in a doorway ahead and he slowed, welcoming the possibility of violence. But the shadow separated from the darkness around it, and a slight figure fled away into the night.

  Alex lengthened his stride, cursing the missed opportunity for distraction. He felt a trickle of moisture irritate his side—aggravating his already inflamed wound, the result of Caruso’s earlier kicks to his ribs. But that wasn’t why he looked for diversion.

  He was hard and throbbing, and had been ever since Jessica had touched his bloodied lip. Her touch had brought with it an erotic lust so intense that it lasted into the coldness of the night. He laughed silently. Jessica would no doubt be amused if she knew what she had done to him.

  But now wasn’t the time, and not just because of his recent injuries, but because he’d been targeted this evening. Perhaps it was merely a coincidence that troops had been stationed both at Sanderson’s and here, but Alex didn’t think so. Someone didn’t want him to leave Capella alive, but whoever that person might be, and Alex had a fairly good idea, he was going to be sorely disappointed this night.

  Movement ahead of Alex had him reaching for his pistol. Sweeping it up, almost of its own accord, the glare from the beam was like a flare cutting through the night sky. A cry of pain, followed by abrupt silence, suggested that it had reached its intended mark. Still the altercation hadn’t gone unnoticed, as several more shouts now echoed from out of the fog. They seemed to be drawing closer, so Alex increased his pace. After all it wouldn’t be much of a distraction if they caught him too soon. Twice he had to slow his pace, reaching out through the mist and gloom with his fusion pistol to clear a path, until he finally arrived at his intended destination.

  Jessica would have probably called it a tank, but Alex knew better.

  Technically it was an Infantry Section Vehicle. With a crew of three, it was capable of transporting dozens of troops, hundreds of kilometres, with a maximum speed of approximately one hundred kilometres per hour. It was heavily armed with a forty millimetre cannon, two ten millimetre chain guns and four grenade launchers—which were almost certainly the source of the earlier smoke grenades. It was the primary mode of transport for the local public security militia. But it was none of these characteristics that had drawn him to it, for unbeknown to many, it had a significant design flaw. As late in the production stage it had been discovered that the Auxiliary Power Unit, required to start the engine from cold, wouldn’t fit within the armoured housing. Therefore, faced with the prospect of having to redesign the vehicle, with the massive costs that entailed, it was instead decided to reduce the thickness of the armour around the APU. A minor design oversight that had unforeseen consequences, because in the event that the APU was damaged due to an armour piercing shell, it caused a power surge from the APU directly into the main propulsion unit of the vehicle. This was certainly catastrophic for the occupants, whose remains had been found as far as ten kilometres away from the resulting explosion.

  This still left Alex with the predicament that he was totally out of the armour piercing tank shells, and the APU was still shielded behind seventy-two millimetres of armour plating. “This is going to hurt me, just as much as it will you,” Alex muttered between clenched teeth and, as he raised his pistol targeting the weak spot, it came alive. The beam illuminated the vehicle and made flickering shadows that danced between the two of them. Then the beam that linked the two wavered and solidified. The hull began to glow yellow, red and then an incandescent white, before it started to run like molten wax. But the effect on Alex was equally profound, as after a few seconds the hand holding the pistol went numb, followed soon after by a ‘pins and needles’ sensation that started in his hand and ran up the length of his arm to his shoulder. This was swiftly followed by a sharp pain, like molten lava running along his nerves and then directly into his brain.

  Idly he wondered where that inhuman scream of pain originated from, until he realised that it was his, alone.

  *****

  It was the distant flashes of light that roused Jessica back to consciousness. Where she’d been, she was unsure. Her last memories were of Alex vanishing into the night and her leaning back against the wall...

  Shaking her head to dispel the stupor that seemed to have enveloped her, she took a hesitant step forward, then another. One step, followed another and she quickened her pace. The physical activity seemed to better revive her than anything else and, before she knew it, she was racing in the direction of the flashes of light. Anybody else would have dismissed them as nothing but distant illuminations, but she knew better. Until recently she’d possessed a fusion pistol of her own and instantly recognised its distinctive signature. Still, when faced by the scene in front of her she came to such an abrupt stop that she almost tripped and fell—Alex, in a standoff, with a tank?

  She couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. Alex with his pistol raised, producing a stream of energy that seemed to glow with ribbons of colour, directly into the front of the tank. In the dark, the beam cast long dancing shadows, which made the scene almost unearthly.

  Two demons facing off, one pitted against the other.

  A shout from behind shattered her illusion, and she swung around to face three armed men, soldiers, dressed just like the previous ones, with their weapons drawn. All three were fixated on Alex, who seemed oblivious of their presence. They froze. Eyes darting nervously from one to the other. Nobody seemed quite sure what to do, as their basic training had never prepared them for such an eventuality.

  The silence was exploded by Alex, whose head suddenly fell backwards, mouth agape, as he emitted the most inhuman scream that Jessica had ever heard. It was as if his very soul was being torn asunder. The effect on the three soldiers was equally pronounced, for their expressions all shifted to one of pure terror. They reacted in the only way they knew how, by raising their weapons and depressing the triggers—

  Her older brother had once described it to her as muscle memory. A physical action, that through repetition, the body carried out without conscious thought or effort. Therefore, she was already reaching for her own pistol, raising it and levelling it at the first soldier, arm outstretched, locked at the shoulder, with her other hand moving of its own accord, whilst releasing the safety.

  Crack, Crack.

  She’d already pulled the trigger, twice, in quick succession, before her thought process had even caught up with her body. But by then she was already twisting round, to face the next man, the recoil of the weapon a natural extension of her own body’s movement. She sighted the weapon down the barrel. A part of her that seemed disconnected with her body, noted the incredulous expression of the second, who was frantically trying to turn to face this new threat. He was too late.

  Crack, Crack.

  Once again she was spinning round, to face her final adversary. This one had already recognised the imminent danger and was turning, bringing his own weap
on to bear. A race, to see who could fire first, before the other.

  Crack, Crack.

  Jessica’s pistol once again spat fire, crackling with death and, like the first two, the third and final soldier crumpled to the ground and was still.

  The entire sequence of events couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds and suddenly her heart resumed beating, air filling her lungs once again and time seemed to resume its usual pace. The square was once again still. Alex’s abrupt cry had halted, his pistol falling silent. It trembled in his grasp, before falling. Making a light splash as it fell into a shallow, muddy puddle at his feet. Still he paid it no notice, instead staring sightlessly ahead.

  Silence percolated the scene and for the first time Jessica shivered in the cold night air. She just stood there, still for a moment, as darkness once again came crashing down like a wave on the scene. She suddenly felt terribly alone, like the first night in Alex’s house. For a single terrifying moment, she thought Alex was dead, as he stood so still and motionless. However, almost as soon as the thought crossed her mind, he gasped, drawing in a deep breath, he blinked once, twice and then toppled backwards, like a tree that had just been felled.

  *****

  Staring up at the night-time sky, it took Alex a moment to recollect his surroundings, followed swiftly by the pain. It felt like every nerve ending was on fire. He gritted his teeth as his entire body seemed to be caught in one massive spasm.

  “Alex, are you all right?”

  He blinked. Looking up, into the concerned face of Jessica, who was staring back down at him. Lady Jessica Hadley. Right. Probably too much to hope that she’d followed his instructions and returned to Sanderson and Garret. But at the same time something kept niggling at the back of his mind, something he’d been doing, an unfinished task. Suddenly it all came flooding back. The Infantry Section Vehicle. The Auxiliary Power Unit. His fusion pistol.

  Alex took one glance at the vehicle, which seemed to be vibrating with a horrifying intensity, as if it was struggling to hold back a wave of destruction. Quickly finding energy born out of desperation, in one swift move he scooped up his pistol in one hand, grabbing Jessica with the other and half pulling, half dragging, struggled to get them both away from the vehicle. They were still half a dozen metres away from the nearest cover, when Alex felt the air shift like an indrawn breath before the explosion. Alex frantically pushed them both to the ground, smothering her beneath his own body.