The Mandate of Heaven (24 page)

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 weapon 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.

“What do you think—”

She never got the chance to finish the sentence as everything around them disappeared into a brilliant white light.  Even with his eyes tightly shut, the light seemed to penetrate through his eyelids.  It seemed to take on a life of its own, consuming all the other colours, until it alone was all that remained.

*****

Alex awoke for the second time to a weird and lurid landscape of a different world, for the surrounding features of Capella had gone.  To be replaced with a barren and desolate landscape.  For the first time in the long night, Alex could see clearly as the smoke and mist had now gone, together with the Infantry Section Vehicle, as where it had previously stood was now nothing but a shallow crater, nothing remained of the tank—or crew.  Alex idly wondered if some person several kilometres distant was going to have a rude awakening, finding that he or she was no longer alone in their bed.

A hacking coughing from beneath him reminded Alex that he wasn’t alone.  Rolling carefully to one side, he was relieved to find that she was no worse for wear.  He took a moment to run his hands along her body looking for any visible signs of injury, until she brushed his hands aside, sitting up and stared disbelievingly at the scene of devastation that surrounded them.

“What just happened?” she demanded incredulously.

“A power surge from the APU into the MPU.  You see the ISV has a design flaw where—never mind,” he muttered, noticing her confused expression.  “We’d better find Sanderson and the rest of the team then get out of here.  It’s likely that somebody noticed the resulting explosion.”

“Ya’ think?” she repeated, doing a fair impression of Sheriff Abercrombie’s twang.  Shaking her head in disbelief, she looked up and her eyes narrowed.  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she exclaimed.

Alex followed her gaze and couldn’t help but smile.  For Sanderson had obviously found them and was carefully picking his way in their direction, but it wasn’t that which had drawn Jessica’s ire, but the fact that he had one hand stuffed in his threadbare jacket and the other holding his ever present cigar.  Puffing away, the glow of the cigar lighting up the dark, anyone could have mistaken him as an unconcerned bystander taking a stroll.

Behind him fanned out the rest of the Easy Company, dragging dazed and senseless soldiers from the rubble, efficiently relieving them of their weapons in the process.  Piling the guns high in the middle of what remained of the square, it eventually resembled a large mountain cairn, surrounded on all sides by the collapsed ruins of the buildings.

“High-Lord Stanton is going to be royally pissed,” Sanderson commented, taking in the scene and nodding approvingly, before taking another puff of his cigar.

Today we celebrated harvest festival. An annual celebration to give thanks for a successful harvest, which predates time. I have little to give thanks for and certainly nothing to celebrate
—
I didn’t attend.

—From the journal of
Lord Alexander Greystone
,

Arcturus, Sirius System

The first inkling Alex had that something was wrong, was when Jessica tripped and fell.  Since first laying eyes on her, weak was not the first word that came to mind.  Beautiful, definitely, followed closely by pain-in-the-ass.

Weak?  Not so much.

Still as he reached down, taking her hand to help her rise, he was suddenly taken aback by her pale demeanour, trembling limbs and listless expression.

“Are you feeling okay?” he asked, realising how absurd the question sounded, even to his own ears.  She was highborn, eldest daughter of a High-Lord.  She had an immune system that would decimate the plague, a respiratory system that barely needed air and a skeletal system dense enough to bounce bullets.  Anything strong enough to cause her more than a mild discomfort, probably would have already wiped out the entire planet’s populace.

“I’m fine,” she insisted, brushing away his hand, standing unaided.  “It’s nothing that a few hours of sleep won’t cure.”

Alex could well understand that, having travelled a little over eight light years and back again, in twelve hours, it brought a whole new meaning to the term jet lag.  “I’ll accompany you,” he replied brashly, concern for her wellbeing clouding his better judgement.  Not that he seemed to have much good judgement when it came to her anyway.

“You’ll do what?” she demanded, turning to face him.  “You’ll do no such thing.  I’m perfectly capable of finding my own bed and sleeping
unaccompanied
for a couple of hours.”

A thousand comebacks leapt to the forefront of his mind, but by then she’d already turned her back on him and taken a couple of paces, in the direction of her bed, he could only assume.  He assumed that was her intended destination, as the steps taken were completely in the wrong direction.  He was therefore close at hand to catch her, when moments later she fainted dead away.

Stubborn
, he thought, holding her tightly.  Definitely stubborn.

*****

His concern for her had escalated to the point of near panic, when several hours later she had still failed to wake.  By then her temperature had risen to an alarming level, fortunately her heart was still beating strongly, too strongly perhaps, as it was currently beating somewhere above one-hundred and fifty beats per minute.  Alex could only assume that this wasn’t normal, even for a highborn lady.  Add to this cold sweats, dilated pupils and spasms that only seemed to be getting worse and Alex was beside himself with worry.

He desperately tried to recollect everything that he’d ever read about illnesses affecting the High-Lords and Ladies, yet what he’d read about such afflictions amounted to pretty much nil, for as far as he knew none such existed.  However, he had read a vast literature on sicknesses, symptoms and their treatments, enough to fill a small library in fact.  Hence he was certain that all the symptoms that Jessica was displaying, pointed to one inescapable fact—she was deep into withdrawal.  Which was a problem, as while Alex was aware that a number of the High-Lords and Ladies utilised various opiates and narcotics, he couldn’t imagine Jessica being one of their number.  The sound of the door creaking open interrupted Alex’s thoughts.

“How is she doing?” Sanderson asked, slipping into the room, closing the door firmly behind him.

“Not good,” Alex replied rubbing his face wearily.  He’d been awake for almost forty-eight hours and, even for an insomniac like himself, he knew he was reaching his limit.  “Her condition doesn’t seem to have deteriorated, but she’s definitely not getting better.”

“Perhaps a hospital?  I assume you’ve got one on this backwater planet.”

“Yes, we’ve got one, but the first thing they will want to do is to run some tests.  It will be a little hard to explain away how she has a couple of chromosomes extra than the rest of us.”

“Well, in that case we’ve got another problem,” Sanderson confessed.  “As the local sheriff is downstairs enquiring about a certain Lady Jessica Hadley.”

“Great,” Alex buried his face in his hands despairingly.  “Just what I need, Abercrombie interfering again.  What did you tell him?”

“What do you think I told him?  He’s the
sheriff
and last time I checked you had kidnapped the girl—I told him that you weren’t home, I’d never heard of the girl and perhaps it would be better if he spent his time looking for real criminals instead of figments of his imagination.”

“Oh, by the High-Lords.”

“But I don’t think he fell for it.”

“No, really?  In that case you’d better send him up.”

“Good plan, Colonel.  We’ll ambush him on the way.  I noticed some hardwood ashes we could leach to produce lye; we could dissolve the body—”

“Sergeant-Major.  Stop.”

“Sir?”

“The local sheriff already knows about Lady Hadley, please just send him straight up and drop the homicidal scheming.”

“Oh, very good, sir,” Sanderson replied disappointedly, before slipping quietly from the room.

Alex turned his attention back to the motionless form in his bed, thinking back to his time on Osiris, before they’d first met.  He hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary as he’d passed through her quarters; no injectors, bottles, medicines or pills.  Nothing.  He’d stared down at her unconscious form, just as he was doing now, reaching out to touch her, brushing the back of his hand against her cheek, skin as soft as silk, pale as the silvery moonlight that had illuminated the scene.  He smiled at her instinctive reaction, touching his nose where she’d hit him with her pistol.  Seriously, who slept with a pistol under their pillow anyway?  Well he did and he never went anywhere without it, obviously a trait that they both shared, as she had admitted doing the same the very next day.  She’d confessed to feeling helpless without it, a part of her missing, and he knew exactly how she felt…

He withdrew his own pistol, staring at it thoughtfully.  The light from the micro-fusion reactor, pulsing in time to his own heartbeat, cast long shadows across the room.  Yet, he couldn’t see how this could be the source of her illness.  After all he’d been separated from his, for almost five years.  It wasn’t as if they permitted personal weapons while he’d been incarcerated in prison.  Before Jessica he’d never talked to anybody else about his years in dark, solitary, confinement.  The first few months had been the worst; fevers, claustrophobia and hallucinations.  First indistinct shapes, with his brain trying to make patterns from the dark, then people and places from his past.  The final one he could remember with crystal clarity, having afternoon tea using fine bone-china, with the devil himself.  He had been immaculately turned out, in a dark, pinstripe suit, hair slick, combed back, eyes as dark and bottomless as a black hole. In many ways he reminded Alex of his court appointed attorney, evil incarnate.  The bargain struck between them had been straightforward—his mortal soul in return for Stanton’s.  The final contract running to over thirty pages in length, the devil in the detail, according to Lucifer.  Alex had signed it, in triplicate.

But perhaps he had everything backwards?

What if it hadn’t been the confinement that caused all these symptoms, but the absence of his fusion pistol?  Certainly Professor Alcubierre had expressed concerns about his health on more than one occasion.  Constantly urging him to keep the weapon close at hand.  At the time he had just assumed that the Professor was talking about his personal safety, but perhaps he meant the warning literally?  Keep the weapon close, or your health would suffer.  The weapon had been prototype, developed by the Professor to experiment with miniaturising the fusion reactor, later to be incorporated into his shuttle
Celeste
.  But he’d never used the neural interface in any subsequent experiments.  A failure perhaps?  Or more likely possessing an unanticipated side-effect.

“You gave me your word that you wouldn’t allow any harm to come to her,” an accusing voice called out from behind.  “Now what, you’re going to shoot her?”

“I’m trying to help her,” Alex replied, frowning, his thought process derailed.

“By pointing a pistol at her?” Abercrombie replied incredulously.

“Shut up,” Alex snapped irritably, “and you might want to take a step back.”  Closing his eyes momentarily he focused his thoughts on the weapon in-hand, releasing it, separating himself from it.  It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do, yet if he didn’t, he feared that it would cost Jessica her life.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Abercrombie whistled beside him.

Alex opened his eyes, staring down at the pistol.  It remained unchanged in his hand, but somehow different.  No longer pulsating in time with his own heart, instead it glowed a consistent, lacklustre yellow.  No longer bound to him.  Available to bond with another—assuming that she was still capable of doing so.  Taking a couple of steps to her side, Alex quickly slipped the pistol into her hand, tightening her fingers around it, glad not to have to touch it any more.  The desire to reach out and reconnect was excruciating.

“What happens now?” Abercrombie asked, intrigued.

“I’m not sure,” Alex admitted.  “I guess it’s up to her now.”

Still after several minutes it became obvious that nothing was happening, as she continued to lie there, unchanged, the pistol lying limply in her hand.

“Nothing’s happening,” Abercrombie said, stating the obvious, out loud.

“She just needs some persuading,” Alex insisted determinedly.  “Jessica, wake up,” he shook her firmly by the shoulders.  “You need to focus.  Come on, you’ve done this before, you can do it again, otherwise I’ll be forced into something that we’ll both regret.  It will involve lots of touching, you remember that, don’t you?”

He brushed the back of his hand against her cheek, like he’d done on the night they first met.  “If you don’t wake up, I’ll be forced to join you, in that bed.  You remember how much you hated that idea, didn’t you?”  He eased the covers away from her, enough to let the cool air circulate against her bare flesh.  Leaning forward he brushed the shell of her ear with his nose and she instinctively flinched away from the cold contact.  “That’s right gorgeous,” he whispered into her ear seductively.  “You remember this, don’t you?  Now come on, open your eyes, otherwise—” He nibbled at her shoulder and then pressed light kisses to the corner of her mouth.  She arched her neck and he knew it was fruitless, but he couldn’t help hoping he was making some headway.  He stilled when he felt her shift again, mumbling something, but didn’t rouse from her slumber.

“Fine,” Alex groused resignedly.  “We’ll have to do this the hard way, but remember that I warned you.” With that his tongue flicked out, reaching out for the crease between her soft lips, touching, seeking entrance.  She instinctively turned to him.  He deepened the kiss, searching her lips with his own, pressing, savouring the luxury of her mouth.  He pulled her lower lip between his teeth and sucked at it—

Jessica’s eyes suddenly flashed wide-open with shock, instinctively reaching out for the pistol that she always slept with, under her pillow, always within reach.  The beam flashed overhead, missing Alex’s head by inches.  With a loud
thump
and a curse, he hit the floor.  The beam meanwhile gouged a blackened scar against the far wall, where only moments before Abercrombie had been standing.

“Do you think it’s safe to come out now?” a muffled voice enquired from behind the chaise longue.

“She’s sleeping now,” Alex replied, peering carefully up from the floor.  Across the bed he observed her face, a serene expression gracing her features, a gentle snore now emanating from her relaxed posture.

“What just happened?  What on Arcturus were you doing, teasing her like that?”

“She thought that she was still in her bedroom, back on Osiris, dreaming.  She had that same instinctive reaction the first time that we met, reaching for her pistol.  I was just trying to reproduce the scene, so she would react likewise.”

“So it was all an act.”

“Of course,” Alex shrugged nonchalantly, taking care not to meet Abercrombie’s gaze, having no wish to be called out for the lie.

“And what about you?  I assume that you’re going to eventually suffer from the same debilitating illness?”

“Perhaps,” Alex replied, “but it took a couple of weeks for the symptoms to become apparent.  We’ve got time to work something out.”

“Talking about time, yours is almost up.  Remember the promise that you made to me.”

“I remember.  We’ll discuss it tomorrow, but first I need some sleep.”

Abercrombie looked at Alex with a raised eyebrow, before turning to face the slumbering form, fast asleep, spread-eagled out across Alex’s bed.

“I’ll take the couch,” he said.

*****

Alex awoke to the strangest sensation brushing against his cheek.  Several times he swept it aside, but it kept returning.  Resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going to be getting any further sleep, he rubbed his eyes, trying to banish the sleep and clear his blurry vision.  Blinking rapidly to restore his sight, the first thing that he observed was Jessica standing before him, alive and well.  This was swiftly followed by the realisation that the sensation brushing against his cheek had in fact been the barrel of his fusion pistol, now pointed firmly at his chest.