The Mandate of Heaven (4 page)

“I’m sure that he can survive by himself,” Nick shrugged.  “Anyway from what you tell me he isn’t much company anyway, either engrossed in some book or another, or busy writing away in his journal.  By the way, why doesn’t he use a data-recorder, like the rest of us?”

“Probably because he would have no way to charge it.  We’re not connected to the town’s energy distribution grid, remember?”

“I don’t see why not.  According to my father, yours is as rich as Croesus.”

“Croesus?” I echoed with a smirk.

Nick had the decency to blush before muttering, “Okay, so maybe I read a little of that book that you lent me, although I didn’t understand much.  Was it really written about some fella that lived on another planet?”

“Croesus was King of Lydia, a kingdom that once existed on Earth, about three thousand years ago,” I confirmed.

“Cor, blimey!”

“Nick, what was the news?”

“What news?” he replied, confused.

I took a deep breath, trying to hold back my scream of frustration at my easily distracted friend.  “The news that you came running up to tell me not five minutes ago, desperate to share with me, you know the news
that you haven’t told me yet
.”

“Oh, that news.”

“And?”

“The SPC
Orion
intercepted a refugee transport heading into the System and according to the Tower there were thirty refugees on-board, including men, women and children.”

I stumbled to a halt, deep in thought.  To describe the
Orion
as a system patrol craft was stretching incredulity to the breaking point.  It was a hurriedly patched up freighter with a few bolted on laser emitters, that fed directly from its ancient and extremely unreliable, ion engine.  I should know having spent several months making it flight worthy, or near enough.  Suddenly his words clicked in my head and I looked at my old school friend with sudden concern.  “What do you mean there
were
thirty refugees on-board?”

“They’re all dead now.  The
Orion
opened fire on the freighter after they refused to turn back,” Nick’s response was muffled, as he was busy digging through a small rucksack that he had been carrying on his shoulder, finally withdrawing a sealed container with much delight.

“They’re what?” I clenched my teeth, biting back my anger.  After all it wasn’t Nick’s fault, he was just the messenger.

“Dead,” Nick repeated, unperturbed.  “I’m surprised that you didn’t already know, after all it was your father that ordered the
Orion
to intercept the freighter.”  He finally looked up, after managing to unseal the vacuum container that had stored the cream cake perfectly, but I was already long since gone.

*****

The sound of the door being flung open and slamming into the wall reverberated like a gunshot, and I winced at the sound.  They probably heard the bang back at the spaceport, almost ten kilometres distant.  While I could not take my ire out on Nick, my father was a different matter entirely, from what Nick had said he was likely to be the cause.

The noise caused Lucifer to raise his head sleepily, giving me an indignant glare, before settling back down to sleep in front of the fire.  Lucifer was my father’s ever-present Wolfhound, a term coined by me from a young age, as nobody was quite sure of his pedigree, but I was convinced he once must have been a wolf after my father showed me a picture of one.

The noise barely disturbed my father, pausing writing in his journal for a moment, before resuming.  “Close the door behind you,” he insisted, without even looking up.  “There is a terrible draught in this house.”

“Well, perhaps it’s time you find a new,
smaller
one,” I snapped back, ignoring his subtle rebuke.  “What do you have, thirty-eight rooms, for just the two of us?”

“Thirty-nine,” he grunted.  It was a long-standing disagreement between the two of us, if the twenty-foot square cloakroom counted.

Ignoring his response, I stalked forward to tower over him, as he was still seated behind his desk.  The sun had set over an hour before and it was now dark outside, hence the only source of illumination in the room was the fire, which cast long, dancing shadows.  Not that my father seemed to notice the lack of light, or was particularly moved by it, as he had excellent night vision.  Eventually he sighed, closing his journal, putting his pen aside and giving me his full attention.

It was another peculiar thing that I had noticed about him.  When others paid me close attention, they might look aside, fidget or interrupt.  My father never did any of these things.  He simply sat there, perfectly still and stared at me with his dark, troubled eyes, which so closely mirrored my own.  Unlike my shoulder length, black, wavy locks, I noticed that my father’s close cut hair was starting to show flecks of grey.  He looked tired, more anxious than I ever remember seeing him.  More than that, he simply looked old and it came as a sudden shock to me that my father was almost seventy.  It was the first time that I realised that he wasn’t going to live forever and that one day I would have to go on without him; to step into his shoes and to make the sort of life-and-death decisions that he had just so recently made.

That thought brought me up short, reminding me of my purpose in his study and I leaned forward, placing both of my palms on his desk, trying to use my height to intimidate him.  I could have laughed at the foolishness of it.  Nothing intimidated him.  I could have been High-Lord Zhang and still my father wouldn’t have moved a muscle.  Instead he just continued to stare at me, waiting for me to speak.

“What gives you the right to order the destruction of a ship with thirty souls on-board?  Who made you God?  Or have you started to imagine that you really are a High-Lord now and have decided to join their little cabal?  What are you planning on doing next, hosting a little soirée and inviting them all around for High Tea?” I demanded, aghast at the rancour in my own voice.  I had
never
spoken to my father in such a tone before.

“I never ordered anything,” my father refuted calmly.  “It’s not my place to go making those sort of decisions, they rest with the Planetary Administrator, all they asked for was my recommendation, which I duly gave.”

“Don’t give me that nonsense,” I interrupted, making a slashing motion with my hand.  “The company assigned Planetary Administrator is over eighty-five years old, completely senile and only makes it out of his bed for an hour a day. He spends most of his time drooling over—”

“But he does get out of bed,” my father interjected, proving that he also was able to cut me off in mid-sentence.

“—his buxom, blond, twenty-five year old nurse, whose uniform looks like she has just finished a lengthy S&M session.”

“You’re only saying that because you’re jealous that she refused to kiss you in tenth grade,” my father grunted.  “Trust me when I say that she’s not suitable for you and you would be bored of her within a fortnight.  You need somebody to
challenge
you, my boy.”

I blinked, narrowing my eyes at him and was about to retort that it was none of his business when I snapped my mouth shut.  He was trying to change the topic.  “Stop trying to change the subject, you knew that the Tower was going to follow
your
advice, so why?”

My father sighed, looking away for the first time ever.  I should have felt vindicated, but instead it simply depressed me further, another reminder of his advancing years.  “I only recommended that they use force as a last resort, to compel the freighter to turn back.  I assume that they fired on it after exhausting every other possible avenue, we couldn’t let the ship approach Arcturus.”

“But why?”

“The Virus has already reached Canis Major.”

Its official name was Sagouran Fever, where the first official case had been recorded, but now everybody simply referred to it as the ‘Virus’.  After the first five hundred million had died, everybody knew
which
virus that you were talking about.  I felt like somebody had planted a fist in my stomach and I struggled to breathe, falling back into a chair, lest I collapsed on the floor.

“But that’s the adjoining system, it’s barely a light-year away.”

My father simply nodded, looking at me with deeply hooded eyes.  “I didn’t simply recommend that the
Orion
intercept this freighter, my recommendation was that it intercepts
all
incoming ships.  Similarly, all outbound traffic will now be turned back.”

“You’re talking about quarantining Arcturus.”

“Yes.  You know as well as I do that if the virus reaches Arcturus we will have no way of stopping it.  If the most advanced medical research institutes of the Imperium cannot find a cure, what hope do we have?  It’s rare for our only hospital to even have an adequate supply of antibiotics, let alone painkillers…”

“I didn’t realise that things had gotten so bad, so quickly.  To have already reached this far, on the very edge of the Imperium.” My voice trailed off as I tried to comprehend the magnitude of the unfolding disaster.  “And there has been no progress with treatment, not even a vaccine?”

“None.  They have tried everything, nothing works, the virus mutates too quickly.  By the time they have mapped its genetic structure and synthesised an antibody, the virus has already mutated a dozen times over and the cure is useless.”

“The mutations are just as potent as the original virus?”

“If anything they seem to be getting ever more virulent, the latest strains have a mortality rate of over ninety percent.  They even fear that some of the latest strains have gone airborne.  There have been cases reported on almost every planet in the Imperium, some of the more remote planets that have become infected seem to have dropped off the corporate-extranet completely, either that or there is just nobody left alive to communicate with.”

“They still haven’t found the source?” I asked weakly.  While I was no doctor even I knew that if we could find an original strain of the virus then perhaps we could find a cure, which would work on all mutations.

“There doesn’t seem to be a source,” my father slapped his palm on the desk in frustration.  “Whilst the first official case was reported on Sagouran VI, additional investigation has found a dozen similar cases on other planets.  It doesn’t help that the virus has such a long incubation period, weeks in some cases.”

This was what made Sagouran Fever so lethal.  Most virulent outbreaks quickly burnt themselves out, killing the carrier before the virus could spread further, but this one was different.  It could remain dormant and undetected in the bloodstream, quietly multiplying and spreading, before suddenly flaring up and killing the host in a matter of hours.

It was the perfect killer.  Silent.  Long-lasting.  Easily spread and ever so deadly.

I just could not take it all in and for a brief moment wondered if my father was perhaps mistaken and that this was all just a bad dream.  But as this had been going on for years, surely I would have woken up by now?  Anybody else would have dismissed my father as the ravings of a madman, after all, how could he possibly know?  Trapped inside this isolated house, with no power, no visible sign of communications and never any visitors.  Yet he had never been wrong before and I had my own theory, one he had just unwittingly confirmed with his reference to the corporate-extranet.  Although the mega-corporations hated each other, even they had to communicate between themselves, if for no other reason than to trade with each other. As a result of this the corporate-extranet had come into existence, which was a simple bridge linking each of the corporation’s internal data networks.

It mattered little that it was mostly used by the various corporations to try and attack each other, with huge cyber-warfare battles taking place daily, as each tried to outwit, undermine or subjugate the others.  As far as I knew, there were only two terminals, or Superluminal Transmitters, on Arcturus.  One at the spaceport where I worked, mostly used to transmit shipping schedules, the other at the Planetary Governor’s residence, where he could receive orders from his corporate superiors.

Still I suspected a third, hidden somewhere in this house, most probably in this very room as my father spent most of his time in here.  I still didn’t understand how this was possible, as the link was maintained via faster-than-light, but with a bit rate measured in hundreds of bits per second.  The cost was beyond astronomical, with a single bit costing thousands of credits, because the only way to power such a transmitter was via a fusion reactor.

I knew with absolute certainty that there was only one such reactor on the planet.  It was easily visible, standing a little over three hundred feet tall, twice that wide, all to house the superconductors that generated the massive magnetic fields that contained the reactor, the heart of a star.  It was for the same reason that faster-than-light ships were so massive, most being over many kilometres in length.  All to contain the massive fusion reactors needed to power the Alcubierre drives.  How my father managed to obtain such a transmitter and power it, when I knew we were far beyond the limits of the town’s energy distribution grid, was a complete mystery to me, but one that I was intent on solving one day.