Fifty-four thousand Earth years on from the great days of ocean cruising, the Earth no longer existed, never mind Hendricks gin. However, she always carried her own supply, and she had an arrangement with the Maître d’ who brought it at just the right temperature in one of her own Waterford crystal glasses.
The room in the hotel was truly unique. When she came to the Crystal City she always stayed at Jammie’s. The original Jammie family, legend had it, was from the first rogue ship that found the deserted city and colonised it. Now it was the premier luxury hotel in the civilized, ‘Verse and the views from her suite, of the adjacent star systems, were awe inspiring.
Still it was simply furnished in quiet good taste with silken fabrics and, unheard of in this sector of the ‘Verse, exquisitely made wooden furniture. Just one of the wooden chairs in this room would repay the planetary debt of a minor backwater world. Miss Thrope was a reasonably frequent guest at Jammie’s, and this suite was reserved for her exclusive use.
Tonight, she was hosting a dinner with old friends, including Alberto Stiletto, a complex and interesting man with his own space station, Sunshine, whose library had a magnificent view of the adjacent Horse Head Nebula. There would be eight altogether, which she found just right. She had a lovely round dining table that had been a present from Claude when she stayed with him at Giverny. Everyone facing each other, so much better for conversation. The food was local and as such indescribable. If you were on Earth how could you describe the taste of oysters or sashimi to a Bedouin prince living in a tent in the middle of the Sahara Desert? Needless to say, the hotel provided the finest cooks, and her luggage did contain a case of very fine French wine she had bought recently at her favourite little caviste at Annecy, where she had a lovely home overlooking the turquoise waters of the French town’s beautiful lake.
“And what happened to our rodent friends?” asked Stiletto over a sip of Monbazillac.
“Oh, in the end it was just too much,” replied Miss Thrope. “It all unravelled in Rome, in that lovely little boutique near the Trevi Fountain?”
Stiletto smiled politely, as if he had any kind of clue, which particular little boutique his friend was referring to. Obviously encouraged, Miss Thrope continued with her tale. “Just materialised right next to me whilst I was trying on a lovely cerise creation.”
“How rude,” observed her friend, dryly.
“Yes, so I relieved him of his rude sensibilities, right there on the spot. Clean you understand, wouldn’t want to splash on Chiara’s drapes. Then I followed his energy line back to the other two and invited them to savour the après vie.”
“And did you ever find who they were working for?”
“No.”
There was a short delay as Miss Thrope unwrapped a mint and nibbled at it thoughtfully. “In that respect they were very good.”
Stiletto poured port for them all from his fabled supply and a collective sigh went around the table.
“Friends.”
Later they were sat in comfortable chairs and sofas in Ann’s drawing room, enjoying more of the bottles of port Stiletto had brought. The rumour was that he had been given a wagon full of cases by a grateful Napoleon after his help at the battle of Smolensk.
“That reminds me of a time years ago,” said Stiletto, “when my friend Haydrift lost his hand in a museum in Cambridge during a mission that went wrong.”
“What happened Alberto?” asked Beetle, the owner of Jammies, and one of Ann’s oldest friends. He was universally known as a tremendous gossip, although Ann had discovered very early on that he exhibited a fierce loyalty and discretion, which had led him to be one of her most trusted advisors.
“Haydrift, Gregory and I, were involved with protecting and delivering a mysterious package. We never did discover what it contained. “
“Gregory Cobblestone, your friend who died?”
“Yes.”
“You still miss him.” It was a statement, not a question.
“I do, but this is supposed to be a funny story.”
“I’m sorry Alberto, please continue.”
“It was all mixed up with a girl with red hair that Gregory and I kept running into. She appeared suddenly, and was talking to Haydrift, who clearly didn’t know she was playing for the other team.”
“Where were you when all this was going on?”
“Hiding behind a curtain.”
“Sounds very dramatic.”
“So, what happened next,” asked Beetle.
“There was a grunt and a thud. I come out from hiding to find Gregory lying in a pool of blood. Haydrift finally pulled his attention away from the girl, who then whipped out an iridium wire, looped it over his hand, and with a single tug, cut it off at the wrist.”
“They are so sharp,” interjected Miss Thrope, “I use one myself.”
“What did you do?” asked Beetle.
“Shot the girl, grabbed Haydrift’s hand from the floor, and between us we picked up Gregory and took him through the continuum to Sunshine.”
“Your space station by the Horse Head Nebulae.”
“Yes, my technicians gave Haydrift a new hand, almost identical to the original.”
“Almost identical?”
“Yes, well it did have a few modifications. He found he could open up doorways in the space-time continuum with it, and other useful tricks.”
“But what was so funny?” asked Ann, remembering this was supposed to be an amusing anecdote.
“His face,” laughed Stiletto. “The surprised look on his face as his hand dropped off. The wire was so sharp, he didn’t even feel any pain.”
“Alberto you have a very strange sense of humour.”
Eight
Space - The Station
It was one of her most elegant solutions.
Boris, king of the Zaaaartiktik, was here for an interstellar conference with the other war and drug lords. His was an interesting existence, coming from a fluid world of great gravities and pressures. A special tank of dense mercurial fluid had been constructed, and here Boris held court in the depths of the Station.
Getting onto the Station had been straightforward, although the welcoming committee had been unexpected. Still, she had to get into the heart of the station, to get to the heart of Boris.
Miss Thrope’s solution was simplicity itself, but very dangerous to her own existence. Now concealed in the control centre, she had connected her own neural net into the mind net of the Station, again using a little code worm created by the technicians of her good friend, Alberto Stiletto. Then it was just a matter of drag and drop, as she grabbed the physical co-ordinates occupied by Boris in his tank, dragged them into the vacuum of open space, then just let go. In fact, as the Station was orbiting a rather large and wild planet, all the drop had to do was just hold the mass still for eleven seconds, for the Station was truly immense, and then just let it go. Tough as poor Boris was, the emptiness of the void was an unforgiving place.
For a thousandth of a second infinite pain flashed through every nerve ending in her body. The System had detected her and sent a counter attack. Fortunately, the human mind’s awareness of its own nervous system couldn’t respond so quickly, and thanks to the speed and sophistication of Stiletto’s neural net, it cut the connection and all Miss Thrope felt was a rather disorienting dizziness, which at the moment, couldn’t begin to compete with the agony in both her shoulders.
Nine
The Station
The flower was an anomaly. In an environment that was essentially sterile, metallic and controlled, the room that held the flower was particularly unique.
The room on the Station was completely sealed and regulated. Temperature, light, humidity, all perfectly synchronised. A fine mist containing a precisely blended concentration of nutrients kept the flower in perfect health.
Although the security of this special garden room was exceptionally tight, Miss Thrope leant over, and delicately inhaled its subtle aroma. Rather disappoin
ted, she took a pair of nail scissors from one of her many pockets, and with a quick snip placed the bloom in her button hole, then continued on her way.
“No, the flower wasn’t the hit,” Miss Thrope spluttered, struggling not to spill her wine as she tried to choke back laughter.
Stiletto maintained his calm, leaning forward to top up her glass and with a raised eyebrow, invited her to continue her story.
Ten
Horse Head Nebula - Sunshine
The old man with the long white beard had a distinctive and unusual dress style. He was portly, with a twinkle in his eye, and wore a striking red suit with white buttons. When it was made, in Saville Row, London, it had fitted him like a glove. The material was an intelligent elasticated fibre supplied by a good friend of his, and auto adjusted with time to remain a good fit. Time had been kind to the old man, although like the fibres of his suit, his figure had become somewhat elastic.
This was a busy time for him. There was a myth on certain worlds that at this time of great celebration and festivity, he somehow managed to visit every home, all within one rotation of the planet. The notion of a man in a red suit and white beard whizzing round the world on apparently, a small open craft, yet big enough to contain billions of parcels, and pulled by quadruped animals with large antlers growing out of their heads, was quite fantastic by any standards of infinite possibility.
“So, what do you do,” asked his friend, as they sat together in comfortable chairs by the huge windows of his library, with the magnificent view of the Horse Head nebula, “bend the space time continuum?”
“Basically, yes,” replied the old man in the red suit, sipping his port.
“Why do you bother?”
The old man was silent for a while, enjoying his drink. His eyes seemed to sparkle, not just with a deep joy, but literally with tiny lights around the irises.
“To maintain and bring a little love into the universe,” he finally replied.
Eleven
London
The Hrym sat on his planet in his vast fortress of waste and negativity. His bland and forgettable suit, like his facial features, was a pale and sickly green. His world, or the many worlds he held sway over, stood for all that was insipid and mediocre in the universe. The Hrym’s very essence sucked the joy out of existence. If there was one thing in all of creation that he hated, it was the old man in the red suit.
That is why he had paid the exorbitant fee for the contract.
Little Billy Brambling had been a good boy. Mummy was sick. The illness inside her had been eating her away, and despite the latest medical technology she suffered greatly. Each night little Billy lay in bed aware of the whimpers and agonies of his dearest mother.
In a world of instant gratification, of trainers and handheld computer games, in a world of constant communication through chat rooms of the inane, young Billy was alone. A child with no friends but with a deep love and devotion to his dying mother.
Billy lived in a country vast in wealth. Like most of the universe, ninety nine percent of the resources was held by one percent of the population. On the frontier worlds that Billy read about in his comic books, run by robber barons and warlords, the injustices of `intelligent civilisation’ were obvious. On his own world they were hidden in plain view by the news, entertainment and social media that informed and distracted its lucky citizens.
Billy wasn’t feeling lucky. He was hungry and cold but most of all he was sad. He wanted to help the suffering of his mum. Every day before school, he got up with the sun and made breakfast for the agonised shell of humanity that was his mother. He did his utmost to keep the small garret flat warm, a camping stove from the charity shop, newspapers for blankets. He comforted her the best he could, reading her stories from his few precious comics. There is only so much you can do when you are nine.
Today was the start of a special holiday. There had been no school for several days and Billy had been able to look after his mother all day. Now she was drifting in and out of a troubled sleep, quietly moaning. He was sat in the main room of the small flat. The screen of the video display was dark and silent. Even the poorest members of society had a television. It was considered an essential right of every home. There were hundreds of channels feeding a constant diet of banality and mediocrity, interspersed with the ads, the content messages to consume more and more of those things that Billy instinctively knew they could never afford.
Occasionally there were a few programmes Billy would watch. Factual programmes about the wonderful world he was supposed to live on with beautiful wildlife and waterfalls, rainbows and snow-capped mountain ranges. He enjoyed some movies and series about adventurers and space and cowboys, loving their possibilities, unaware that they were true, yet as remote to his experience as the soaring eagles and painted elephants of his own world.
The assassin had a sense of humour. Time, fate, and destiny aren’t fixed. With time travel, multiple parallel universes, the bending, alteration, and riding of space time, there was a degree of potentiality to events. In some advanced parts of the universe, prediction of events was a little more sophisticated than reading tiny leaves in the bottom of a tea cup, or the lines on the palm of a hand. The man in the red suit was set with a 99.34% chance of visiting little Billy on 24th December, and the assassin was in place and ready.
Billy, unlike his mother, had had a good day. For the past week he had been practicing his songs. He had made his mother’s room as pretty as he could, decorating it with lights and ornaments that he had been getting over time from the pound shop. After a special fish and chip supper, he had stood at the foot of his mother’s bed, proudly and unselfconsciously singing carols in his clear melodious voice. The tears of love in her eyes, replacing the tears of pain, were all the gift he required.
As the old man in the red suit approached the roof of the block of flats where Billy and his mother lived, he could sense the violence to come. He was philosophical. He had lived an extraordinary life and seen many wonders in a universe of infinite possibilities. Still, Billy had been a good boy, and love, with its all-embracing marionette, seemed to be pulling the strings of the universe.
The assassin was silent. Legendary throughout galaxies for ingenuity and attention to detail. Standing perfectly still as the old man in the red suit placed the parcel at the bottom of Billy’s bed. The contract was just for the old man, not the boy. Too much of a professional to be emotionally involved, the assassin still anticipated the satisfaction of a job well done, and the consequences for the world.
The room was full of smiles. The man in the red suit smiled as he looked at the sleeping boy, and gently put his gift by his bed. Little Billy smiled in his sleep, dreaming happy thoughts, riding the wave of the moment. The assassin smiled as his finger closed the pressure on the trigger, and Miss Ann Thrope smiled as the cold steel of her silken blade entered into the soft depression at the base of the assassin’s neck, then angled powerfully upwards into his unsuspecting brain.
The sun crept over the horizon and filled the small room with beautiful winter light. Billy opened his eyes, his strange dream fading from memory. Thinking straight away of his mother, he climbed out of bed, his breath clouding in the cold air, and saw the package brightly wrapped at the end of the bed. A simply hand-written card, “To Billy with love, Happy Christmas."
Twelve
Earth - Paris - Present Day
“Voilà,” said Stiletto as if he had pulled the Sacré Cœur out of his hat, which in a way, he had.
It had all started in the morning when Miss Ann Thrope went down in the antique lift that descended through the centre of the beautiful building where she had her Paris apartment. It was the charred doorway in the lobby that had raised the hairs on the back of her elegant neck. The varnish was blistered and peeling, the wood cracked and splintered.
She forgot about the door as she spent the morning delighting in the wonderful little shops and boutiques that nestled near her Marais apartment. Whichev
er century that she visited Paris, Marais was always her favourite district, like her own beautiful village within a beautiful city. Soon she was walking up to Montmartre where she was meeting Stiletto for coffee.
She might pop over to Luigi’s, a charming little trattoria in a hidden part of Venice, for lunch. She had a hankering for his little pasta parcels, but she had to be back this evening as she was having dinner with Pierre and Maxine at the Jules Verne restaurant near the top of the Eiffel Tower.
She entered Café Le Progrés on Rue Tardieu in Montmartre, noticing Stiletto straight away. He was hard to miss with his bright silk waistcoat under his elegant jacket. The whole ensemble crowned with a magnificent purple top hat. Paris was an exciting place, full of bohemians and eccentrics, and although he drew some odd glances from tourists, about to make the climb to Sacré Cœur, he blended in very well. Rising to hug his friend, kissing both cheeks in the French way, he pulled back a chair for her, and they both sat down. As if by magic a waiter appeared with a tray of delicate pastries and coffees.
“Why are you here?” she asked between sips of coffee.
“Last night I had dinner with Bonaparte at his apartment, so just nipped forward a few hundred years. Actually, it’s just around the corner.”
“I wonder who lives there now?”
“Oh, some magistrate and his family, I think. I wonder if they even know.”
Assassin: Ann Thrope Series Book 1 Page 2