A ‘Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons’ story
by Lezli Farrington
Blinding,
burning, cleansing flame, sterilising the whole world. Then darkness. Pain. Hunger. Ravaging thirst. Sickness that turns bodies inside out. Then…
Then nothing…
I am Rose Metcalfe, and this is
the end of the world. I will be three hundred and one years old when it happens
– when the last human on Earth dies. After all the advances that have been made
within my lifetime; advances that have increased the human lifespan to well
beyond a century, and have increased the quality of life on Earth, it will all
come to an end. Unless I stop it from happening…
She turned up the collar of her thick uniform coat against the biting
December wind as she gazed up at the church, elegantly moonlit on this dark,
clear night. The place had been one of the few places she had been able to turn
throughout her career, despite the fact that she had never been a God-fearing
person. This place had been a sanctuary away from the pressures of home;
somewhere she could escape from the rest of the world for a few hours, even
back in the early days, when the world discovered the terrible truth about
their extra-terrestrial enemies. Her secret had been passed down through the
priests who had led the parish since that day, so that she never needed to fear
meeting a new one and having to explain her situation over again whenever she
felt the urge to leave her real life for a brief time, and speak to someone
away from the military. Gravel that gleamed white in the moonlight crunched
beneath her boots as she approached the sanctuary.
Father O’Connell looked up from his task of removing
spent candles as he heard the doors open. A small figure in a heavy, dark
military overcoat and matching boots entered and looked down the rows of pews
for him.
“Welcome, Major,” he greeted
her, instantly recognising her unique eyes, glowing slightly in the darkened
area at the back of the church. He abandoned his box of tea lights and moved to
meet the woman in the aisle. As he drew closer, and she moved into the light,
he could clearly see her young face flushed with the cold, but troubled and
conflicted.
“Is there anything I can help you with tonight, my
child?” he asked her automatically, cursing himself even as he uttered the word
‘child’. He knew that the youthful countenance before him, framed by short
jet-black hair flattened beneath a Spectrum officer’s cap, was misleading –
although she looked around twenty, this woman was much older.
“I apologise for the late hour, Father,” she said, her
voice betraying British roots, although she had spoken with a clear American
accent when they had first met. O’Connell now knew that the accent had been
affected, but he was not certain exactly what her native tongue was; although
always interpreted by his Universal Translator, she had occasionally spoken in
French, Russian and even the ancient Irish language that his mother had
preferred to use, ‘lest it die out completely’. All
had seemed to have perfect intonation too; there was no trace of the
mispronunciation that the UT somehow managed to convey in its translations.
“Will you hear my confession?” she continued,
oblivious to the thoughts suddenly running though the priest’s head.
O’Connell frowned for a moment. This was something
that she had never asked to do before, although he knew that his predecessor
had once heard her confess. Once.
“Certainly, Major,” he replied, sweeping his hand
towards the ancient confession box.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” Indigo
recited with her eyes closed, recalling the words that she had learned so many
years ago. She was not a Catholic, but sometimes she liked to have the counsel
of someone outside the organisation and the opportunity to get things off of
her chest. Father O’Connell was a wonderful listener, one of her favourites in
fact. Normally she spoke with him whilst they sat in a pew, but this, she felt,
required the formality and secrecy of the confessional. “It has been… um…
seventy-four years since my last confession.
Seventy-four years would take it back to the early
days of Father Maguire’s tenure – and before Father O’Connell’s birth! I
really must stop calling her ‘child’, he reminded himself sharply.
“Thirty-six years ago,” Indigo continued, her voice
shaking slightly, “I killed my father.”
Father O’Connell drew a sharp breath before
responding. “Major… Rose, your father killed himself.”
“But I practically handed him the wires,” she
countered. “I could have stopped him, prevented him having to do it in the
first place.”
“No one has to commit suicide, Rose,” the
priest argued, not unkindly. “You are not responsible for your father’s death.”
“Yes, I am,” Indigo countered her voice barely above a
whisper. “If I hadn’t refused, hadn’t denied him the only thing that would make
him happy, he would still be alive. And I could have stopped him.”
“I don’t understand,” O’Connell said. “What could you
have possibly done; how could you have foreseen your father’s choice?”
“How odd that you should phrase it like that,” Indigo
said bitterly. “One of the so-called ‘gifts’ that I have is precognition. It
comes from the same sense that I have for time and temporal distortion. I don’t
fully understand it and it took over two centuries for me to hone that
particular ability to the point that I could gain impressions of future events
– foresight, as you call it. But I never foresaw what my father did. But even
without that supernatural ability, I should have known what would come.”
*****
“What do you want for your birthday? There’s
only four days left!”
Scarlet looked at his daughter.
Last time she had asked that question, he had not been sure whether to ask this
or not, but now he was.
“I want to die.”
“What?” Indigo’s voice shook. Her
eyes widened and even her hair seemed to pale.
“I want my life back; to grow
old,” he explained, urgently, not wanting her to get the wrong idea, “to retire
peacefully to Winchester with a Labrador and lots of grandchildren. And then I
want to die. Three hundred years is too long to be thirty-one.”
Indigo swallowed hard, opened her
mouth to answer, and then closed it again, finding that she couldn’t speak.
“Rose, please,” Scarlet pressed.
“That’s all I want. One last present. I’m fed up of
birthdays.”
“I…” Stricken, Indigo ran from
the Promenade deck, slamming all of her mental barriers into place to keep
Scarlet out of her head. Fighting tears, she made her way to the Amber Room and
with practiced ease she tapped into her inherited Mysteron abilities and, using
a trick she had only mastered recently, disappeared from view and made it into
one of the lifts to the Flight Deck.
Quickly, before anyone realised what was happening,
she launched Angel Two, one of the fastest space and atmospheric shuttles in
the whole sector, matched only by its sisters, Angels One and Three. It sped
towards Earth and entered the atmosphere before Lieutenant Blue’s voice sounded
on the comm. unit, ordering her to return to base immediately.
Swiftly she shut down the comm.
unit and began to probe the internal systems of the tracking device, finding
the weak point and melted the circuit chip beyond recognition. It would be
simple enough to fix the fault, but it prevented the system from functioning.
She also removed her dog tags and melted the one that acted as her personal
tracker. The agents in Spectrum had all been implanted with subcutaneous
tracking and identification devices many years ago, and Indigo thanked her
lucky stars at that second that her retrometabolism had prevented her from
being chipped in the same way and that she had retained her traditional dog
tags.
The shuttle exited the upper
atmosphere and Indigo altered the direction of travel towards Western Europe,
specifically a large island.
From the still-functioning sensor
system, Indigo knew that she was not being followed – Starbase
had not sent anyone after her. She was safe. Of course, if anyone wanted to
find her, they could. It wasn’t too hard to figure out where Indigo was headed
– home.
Indigo moved restlessly around
the wooded area of her family estate in Winchester, feet crunching on the hard
ground. She was thankful for her Spectrum boots, and that she hadn’t been out
of uniform when she had left Starbase. She did wish,
however, that she had thought to bring either her coat or the keys for the
house – and preferably both. However, wandering the woods in the cold suited
her mood. She walked the familiar paths for what seemed like hours until she
came to the lake. She still didn’t know why the lake was such a comforting
sight for her – at the age of fourteen, whilst staying with her grandparents,
she had drowned in it; definitely one of the least pleasant ways to die.
Fortunately, Ingrid, her grandparents’ collie, had managed to drag her lifeless
body from the lake and summon the help of her grandparents.
Everything had changed so much
since those early days. Things had seemed so simple back then, when she was
newly retrometabolic, before the horrors of the war
had truly caught up with her. Life on Cloudbase was never easy, and people were
lost to the Mysterons on a horrifically regular basis, but her doting father
and godparents had honeyed it all for her, hidden the worst things from her.
Right up until the moment she received her own colour-code, things were almost
perfect. Then everything had gone downhill, and she had seen things that no one
should ever have to see and done things that she would never completely forgive
herself for. The war escalated into something Spectrum had never expected, and
officers – friends – fell thick and fast, whereas she lived on, reviving each
time she was killed in the line of duty. As she worked on honing her unique
abilities in order to fight the Mysterons, she became more aware of the people
around her, as if she had been given a window into their souls. Whilst she was
never truly telepathic with anyone except her father, she could sense strong
thoughts and emotions. And she felt every death like a knife, slicing through
her very being, creating wounds that would leave scars, so unlike her physical
injuries. Every time the survivor’s guilt overwhelmed her, she returned to the
lake. Sometimes she swam, other times she just stood by the edge and
contemplated the cool surface.
The war was long-since over now,
but still a violent faction of Mysterons wreaked havoc occasionally, and every
time she had to kill one of their agents, instead of releasing the tortured
human soul from Hell, she relived the same event in her mind, haunted by her failure
so many years ago, the agent she hadn’t been able to save.
Still, after all this time, the
long years and longer decades, she felt drawn to the lake, a simple body of
water that was so soothing on most occasions, and a way of venting frustration
on others. With a grunt, Indigo sat down on the hardened grass edge and angrily
threw pebbles into the still water.
*****
“Why?”
“Pardon?”
“Why were you angry? If I
am to help you, I have to understand everything. As do you.”
Indigo sighed, recognising
the psychology behind the priest’s question. “I don’t know. I guess I was angry
with myself for taking off like that, with them for letting me go. I’d acted
like a child; taking off in a fit of pique because I didn’t like something I
heard; I was two hundred and sixty-four years
old, for goodness sakes! I suppose in some ways I felt betrayed too,
like he wanted to abandon me, and then I blamed myself for driving him away.
And I was berating myself for not noticing the changes in him that might have
made me realise what he wanted me to do, if I’d paid attention. Three hundred
years is too long for a human to live, even now. He had lived his life to the
full and then some.
“I suppose there was a bit
of hurt involved too – something that he’d said touched a raw nerve in me. He
wanted to retire surrounded by grandchildren, and that was something that was
never going to happen. I’ve never been able to have children because of the
retrometabolism, and I doubt that I ever will. It’s just not a priority for the
scientists to find a way around it. It never normally bothers me; I’m not the
maternal type, but just then, when he said that, it hurt. And even now, I know
that I can’t fulfil his dream. The only way it’ll happen is if he has other
children, and they’re okay.
“Anyway, eventually I got
my act together and went back to Starbase. The
general wasn’t overly happy, but no one has had the guts to court-martial
either me or my dad for a hundred years. General Claret didn’t ask why I’d
left, and I didn’t tell her. Don’t think I could have faced it if she had, to
tell you the truth.”
*****
Captain Vermilion had
deliberately sought Indigo out after his duty shift. No one had seen her since
her return to Starbase the day before, and he was beginning
to get worried. He had never seen her act as irrationally as she had - nearly
three days ago, now - and he needed some kind of reassurance that she was all
right, or soon would be.
Their relationship was
complicated. They had bonded instantly, the massive age difference seemingly
insignificant. Both were only children of Spectrum families; Vermilion had lost
his father at an early age, Indigo her mother. They had first met when
Vermilion was a child, then again when he was a cadet, training at Koala Base
in Australia. She had been there to test some new equipment for detecting and
neutralising a Mysteron threat and had joined him in the cafeteria one
mealtime. She’d recognised him instantly, and he her. He could never forget
those eyes. He’d stared at her as she placed her tray on the table and sat
down.
“It’s always the same,” she’d
laughed. “I bet you had nightmares about Mysterons for weeks after you first
met me, Jonathan.”
“Jack,” he had corrected her. “I
guess people look at you a lot.”
“Only when they don’t know me,”
she had told him, smiling. “After a while they stop bothering, but I wasn’t on
your ship for long enough for you to get used to me.”
She had looked around. “The
facilities have improved since I was a cadet,” she’d noted, and then laughed.
“Do you know, they made me wear blue contact lenses for weeks whilst I was
here, then on every ground assignment I went on for years.”
“Why?” he had inquired, curious.
She had looked puzzled. “Well,
no-one knew. Oh!” she’d exclaimed, a look of comprehension dawning. “Anything
to do with the Mysterons was classified back then, Rainbow Clearance. Civilians
and normal military did not know, nor were they to know that Major Scarlet was
a Mysteron. The whole planet would have been in uproar. By the same reasoning,
no one could know that I was half-Mysteron, not even the cadets here until they
completed their training, hence the contact lenses.
“It was a different world back
then. The Mysterons were a new threat, and the population of Earth was scared.
If news were to get out that there were former Mysteron agents working for
Spectrum, we would not have been able to function as a unit. We would probably
have been shut down. The truth was only revealed when the world was ready to
hear it.
“I was glad for that. It meant
that I could be myself finally. No more hiding or lucky escapes from certain
death, all that kind of thing.”
She had looked at her one-man
audience and blushed slightly, highlighting her girlish features. “I’m sorry; I
didn’t mean to ramble on at you.”
“That’s okay,” Jack had replied,
enthralled. He tried, and failed to imagine a life before the Mysterons. True enough, most were no longer hostile. The two races had long
ago officially put aside their differences and worked in harmony together. However,
the Mysterons were an extremely long-lived race, and some could not forgive the
terrible mistake made by one human man, Conrad Turner, more infamously known as
Captain Black. He had turned the weapons of the exploration vehicle he was
commanding against the peaceful Mysteron base in a moment of confusion and
started the longest war Earth had ever seen.
That much was history, taught at
school, but the woman sitting before him had lived through most of the war; was
the daughter of a former Mysteron Agent, a human killed and recreated to serve
as a body to the non-corporeal Mysterons, someone to do their dirty work. Her
father had been alive at the start of the war, had lived life before the
Mysterons, and was still alive. The idea was intriguing. The chance to discuss
the world, before space travel was commonplace, where Spectrum was confined to
one planet was something he had wished for, for a long time. Jack had studied
the history of Spectrum and the War of Nerves at school, and researched further
when his interest was piqued. But to meet the one of the two people who had
actually lived it, who had seen the first space cruisers leaving the solar
system at, what now seemed a snail’s pace, but then had been the fastest speed
possible. They had seen the first aliens come to Earth and had known the first
alien members of Spectrum.
Her eyes studied him, amused,
almost as if she was able to read his thoughts.
“What makes you think I can’t?”
she’d said, startling him.
“C.. can
you?” he stuttered. “Can you read my mind?”
Indigo laughed teasingly. “Only when it’s written all over your face. I’ll tell you
about it, if you really want to know.”
For some reason, Indigo took him
under her wing and told him everything he had ever wanted to know about the
War. They met for meals every day whilst she was assigned to Koala Base
assisting the scientists, and they discussed all manner of things. He knew that
she pulled strings to have him assigned to Starbase
when he received his commission and, somehow, he found that he didn’t care. He
enjoyed the time they had spent together at Koala, and their friendship
continued to flourish aboard Starbase. Major Scarlet
seemed to adopt him as a second child, after a brief period of unease, the
cause of which Vermilion had never discovered even to this day. It was Scarlet,
also troubled, who had suggested that he try the old crew quarters, and had
given him a list of access codes, along with the locations of the quarters they
related to.
The corridor that he walked down
was only illuminated by emergency lighting, and had been abandoned for years.
It had been quite a busy place once, with officers’ quarters through each of
the doors he passed; back when this was Cloudbase, before it had been
incorporated into Starbase. The subsequent
refurbishments to the base, that had
been carried out to ensure its survival in space, meant that the living quarters were relocated into one of the new
sections, and these rooms, once so high up on the base, were now towards the
bottom and had been abandoned for many years. There were plans for them to be
upgraded to meet modern standards and used as accommodation for temporary
members of staff and those who were just passing through between assignments,
but the funding had not come through yet, and the whole section of the original
base remained unused, although not off-limits.
Vermilion walked right to the end
of the corridor and turned back to retrace his steps. This was the best point
from which to start his search, as all the rooms listed as likely candidates
were towards this end of the deck, starting with the first door on the left.
This, according to his list, had been Indigo’s quarters from 2089 until the
refurbishment. He punched in the number that Scarlet had provided and the door
slid back obediently, revealing a darkened, empty room. Switching on his
flashlight, he searched the interior of the small residence thoroughly to be
sure, including the bathroom and sleeping area, but she was not there.
Carefully ensuring that the door
was locked behind him, he looked again at his list of suspects, and matched
them to his map of the deck. The next door along was that of the commanding
officer’s quarters. It was listed as a last resort, only on the merits that as
a child, Indigo had been close to the first C/O, Colonel White. Scarlet had had
to dig into the computer archives to get the code for that lock, considering
that the rooms had passed through several pairs of hands over the years.
Vermilion bypassed it in favour of the next-door neighbour, the only set of
quarters on Cloudbase designed for a family. It was in these quarters that
Indigo had lived as a child, and up until some three months after receiving her
commission, when she and Scarlet vacated the quarters in favour of the base
colonel and his pregnant wife. Scarlet had given him an odd look when imparting
that information, but Vermilion was more interested in finding his friend than
whatever Scarlet had been thinking about at that time, although he made a
mental note to look up the identity of the colonel in 2089.
He tapped the security code into
the electronic lock, and the door slid back silently, revealing instant signs
of habitation. A door was open to the left of the living area, through which a
soft light was shining. Quietly, Vermilion made his way to that door, pausing
only when he entered the small bedroom. Unlike Indigo’s barren single-occupancy
quarters along the corridor, the bed was still in this room. Upon it sat
Indigo, hunched up against the headrest and the wall and wrapped in a blue
blanket. Her boots, vest and cap lay discarded at the foot of the bed, and she
was simply staring at the lantern that she had set on the desk, apparently lost
in thought.
“Rose?” he said softly, stepping
into the room and laying a gentle hand on her blanket-covered arm.
Dully, Indigo raised her eyes to
meet his, but made no further acknowledgement of his presence.
“Please, Rose,” he implored her.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
Life stirred slightly behind her
alien eyes, and he sat on the bed beside her. Hesitantly, she began to explain
where she had been, stumbling at first over her words, then more fluently as
she told him what had caused her flight and poured her heart out to him as she
hadn’t done for almost a hundred years.
*****
Indigo lifted her head from her
hands and looked despairingly at Captain Vermilion. Her alien eyes seemed
distant, yet at the same time brimmed with tears.
“Can I do it?” she said, echoing
his earlier question. “I don’t know. My only successful experiences with this
have been with much younger Mysteron Agents. Dad’s… well, he’s been like this
for two hundred and eighty-six years. That’s hundreds of times older than what
I normally deal with. It gets harder the longer they’ve been Retro.
“It takes it out of me, it really
does. That’s why I’m so scared. I think I might lose everything if I do this,
and I’m not ready for that. I might not even survive. As much as I love him, I
can’t do what he wants me to.”
Vermilion clasped her hands in
his own and met her gaze. “Rose,” he said softly, “your father ceased to be a
Mysteron Agent two hundred and eighty-six years ago. That influence isn’t there
any more. I’ve seen you battle them before on their
own level, and win more often than not. This is no Mysteron. Your father’s done
the hard part for you. You just need to stop him from retrometabolising.”
“But I don’t know how I do that,”
she whispered. “It’s just something that happens. I want to help him, but I
don’t know how.”
Vermilion brushed away the tear that rolled down
her cheek and leaned over to envelope her in a hug. “He wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” he
said eventually. “Just think about it.”
She nodded sadly. “I owe him
that.”
She grew quiet, until eventually
she relaxed in his arms and her breathing grew steady. Vermilion sighed softly
and stretched out his long legs, contenting himself with simply holding her
whilst she slept.
*****
The priest nodded in understanding. “You were trapped
between your love for your father and your fear of killing yourself, and I
assume, him, in the process.”
“You’re very observant, Father,” Indigo commented
dryly.
“It comes with the collar, child,” the priest said. “I
know what you’re thinking before you do. So, that was the day before his
birthday. What happened on the actual day?”
*****
Indigo managed to avoid direct private contact
with her father all the next day, but could not help but see the questioning
glances he directed at her from across crowded rooms. She knew that there was a party planned; had had a hand in planning it, but she did not feel inclined to
attend, and knew that her father would feel the same. If she agreed to his
request, the process would likely take all night, and was a deeply personal
experience for both participants; if she refused, he would not want to go to
the party at all.
Her thoughts cascaded in her head. Her father, who had raised her almost
single-handedly since her mother had died,
just after her eighth birthday, wanted to experience life as he once had. He
had denied himself the solace of another loving relationship after his second
wife had died; very likely
scared of losing another person he cared for, and had remained single. He was
lonely and needed to live as he once had, as a human.
She, on the other hand, had known no other life. An unusual child due to
her genetic make-up, her retrometabolism had kicked in at thirteen. She had
never truly lived as a human, never experienced growing old. She had also shied
away from love. She had left the only man she had ever been serious about
because she couldn’t be what he wanted her to be: a doting wife who would give
him the family he wanted. His
infatuation with her came from the certainty that she would be there when he
got home, as it were - he didn’t have to worry about her being killed on a
mission. She couldn’t say the same, and had not felt secure enough to commit
herself afterwards.
She wasn’t sure if she could give up the life she had and become
something new, or die in the process of helping her father, for she was certain
that those were the only two possible outcomes of this insane request.
Fear rose in her as there was a knock at the door. Only one person still
knocked - everyone else used the door chime. She answered it through a voice command
to the computer, and her father walked into the room.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said, her voice shaking. “Happy
birthday.”
Scarlet stood awkwardly in the sitting area. “Have you thought about it?”
he asked hopefully.
Indigo refused to meet his eyes. Instead, she stood with her head bowed,
her lashes lowered, in front of the fish tank that had once belonged to her
mother. “Yes,” she whispered. “I… I’m sorry, Daddy. I can’t do it.”
Scarlet looked crestfallen. “I understand,” he said softly. “It was a
lot to ask.” Without making eye contact with her, he turned and left.
The next few days were torturous. Scarlet became more withdrawn than
ever, and refused to speak to anyone unless in the line of his duty, and even
then not to Indigo. Vermilion caught up with her on the nightshift on Starbase control deck. During the night, one Major was left
in charge whilst the duty captain monitored satellite transmissions and
communications. Due to bad luck, Indigo and Vermilion had drawn Christmas Eve
as their night shift. Indigo was deep in thought, lost in her own little world,
and absently turning a cup of coffee in her hands.
“Major?” he said, formally, remembering that he was on duty, then, “Rose?”
She snapped out of her reverie. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
“Are you still thinking about it?”
“Yes.” She paused and drew breath, which seemed to calm her. “I’m going
to do it.”
When he didn’t reply, she continued. “I’ve seen what it would mean to
him for me to give him back what the Mysterons took away all those years ago, and
I know that knowing that he’s happy, means more to me than my fears about
losing what I have. I have to do this.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow,” she said, smiling. “Maybe I couldn’t give him the birthday
present he wanted, but I can give it to him for Christmas instead.” She took a
sip of her coffee.
Vermilion shook his head, glad that the tension in his friend finally
seemed to be gone. “I can’t believe that you two still celebrate Christmas.”
She shrugged,
smiling. “I told you years ago that it was a different world back then.
Religious festivals were upheld fairly rigorously. Maybe not as much as in
previous times, but we still celebrated Easter, Christmas, Lent and all the
others. I had friends who celebrated Eid after Ramadan and others who
celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Chanukah. That’s all changed now. Besides, we don‘t
celebrate it like we used to, just like we don‘t
celebrate our birthdays like you do.”
“When is the next official party, anyway?” Vermilion asked, picking up
his own cup of coffee from where it was perched on the top of his console.
Scarlet and Indigo only celebrated every twenty-fifth birthday nowadays, as
they had seemed to loose meaning after a while; any
other parties arranges in the intermitting years were arranged by other members
of Spectrum as an excuse to let their hair down.
“This is the short wait, between his and mine,” she said teasingly. “Only
eleven years until my two-hundred and seventy-fifth.”
“And you call that short?” Vermilion retorted, choking on his coffee in
shock.
“Well, it’s fourteen after that,” Indigo countered reasonably. “Anyway,
eleven years isn’t all that long - not from my perspective, anyway.”
“Easy to say from your side of two hundred,” he shot back, checking his
board for any aberrations. “For me, it’s almost half of my lifetime!”
The sound
of Indigo’s cup smashing on the floor diverted his attention from the scanner
readouts. Her face was drained of colour and her eyes unfocussed.
“No,” she whispered, so softly that Vermilion barely caught it. Her
chalk-white face was distressed. “No, you can’t.”
Before Vermilion could question further, she had left the control room
and was running through Starbase corridors.
Indigo grabbed the railing with both
hands as she skidded to a halt on the uppermost deck of the engine core. She
overbalanced slightly, and lurched unsteadily over the barrier, seeing plainly
as she did so, her father, three floors down, clad in his Spectrum uniform and
standing much too close to the primary outlets on the generator.
“Daddy!” she screamed, using both her voice and her mind to get his
attention. “Please, don’t do this!”
Scarlet looked up to her. Even from this height, she could see his
handsome, young face, resigned, sorrowful, yet determined.
‘I’m sorry, Rosie,’ he thought to her, using the
link that had summoned her to this place, the link that they had fought to be
able to use to the extent that they now could. Scarlet’s thought carried with
it the pain in his heart, and terrible confirmation of what Indigo knew she had
felt before. ‘This is the only way. Goodbye, sweetheart.’
‘Daddy, please,’ she begged, using all of her
power to make him hear the thought, even as his eyes closed. With his face
still turned upwards towards her, he reached out both his hands and grasped the
live electricity conduits. Thousands of volts ripped through his body for the
second he was in contact with the current, before his muscles convulsed, making
him release the outlets, and he collapsed to the floor, dead long before he hit
the ground.
*****
Every single person on Starbase felt the
telepathic cry of distress and horror that came from the mind of Rose Metcalfe
that moment. Psi-sensitive and non-sensitive individuals alike were caught up
in her grief, although they would not realise what the cause of the disturbance
was for many hours.
Jack Svenson, who had left the Control Room
not long after his friend, heard the scream that echoed around the core, louder
than he would ever have thought possible from the tiny woman, saw her collapse,
still grasping the guardrail with all her strength, her eyes never leaving the
blackened form three decks below.
Swiftly, he approached her, knelt on the deck and pulled her to him,
making her turn away from the body. For long minutes, all she did was to sit
stiffly in his arms, drawing choked breaths, until eventually her eyes filled
with tears and she clutched to him, sobbing. Gently, he rocked her, stroking
her dark hair and forcing himself not to look at the body of her father.
General Claret was not in the best of moods as she stalked towards the
engine core. The alarm had sounded in her quarters the instant that there had
been a power fluctuation, and after she had recovered from the intense
sensation of loss she experienced for no apparent reason, she contacted the
Control Room to get an update, only to receive no response at all. Instantly,
she roused Lieutenant Blue and sent him up to the Control Room to take command
whilst she went to meet the engineers at the core. If Indigo and Vermilion didn’t
have a damn good excuse, she would have their commissions for dereliction of
duty.
Lieutenant Almond was waiting for her at the last junction in the
corridor before the access to the core. The chief engineer was wringing his
hands nervously and refused to meet her eye.
“Do you know what caused the power failure, Almond?” she barked at him.
“Yes, ma’am,” Almond replied, very quietly. “Er,
you might not want to go in there right now, ma’am – it’s still a mess, and,
well, you Centaurans are known for your sense of
smell…”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Claret demanded, becoming
increasingly irritated with the human. She could feel her gills begin to flush,
as they always did when she was annoyed, and they prickled uncomfortably in the
dry atmosphere.
“Well, ma’am, you see, there’s been a suicide,” Almond said eventually.
“Suicide?” Claret
repeated in disbelief, lowering her voice so that it would not carry. “Who? Oh no, not…” She stopped speaking as she connected the
dots – Indigo missing from her post, with Vermilion also gone; the intense
telepathic broadcast that had almost overwhelmed her earlier, the electrical
failure…
“Scarlet,” she concluded in a flat voice.
Almond nodded pathetically. Claret had to remind herself that he was an
engineer, not a field officer, and resist the urge to throttle him for being so
wet. The poor man was not used to death the way that the field agents and starship crews were, and he had obviously seen the burned
body for himself. She remembered the first time she had seen an electrocuted
Mysteron agent, and knew how Almond felt. It was not a pretty sight.
Quickly, she pushed past Almond and strode down the corridor to the
engineering gantry. She could smell the stench of cooked flesh before she
reached the doors to the core. She steeled herself against the distasteful
odour and continued. The doors opened obediently for her, answering her earlier
suspicions. On the floor of the deck, in a tangle of limbs, were Indigo and
Vermilion. The young man looked up at her as she approached,
a helpless look on his face.
The Christmas celebrations, as few and far between as they were in
Spectrum, were cancelled as news of Major Scarlet’s death spread throughout the
organisation. By midday, the news was halfway across the sector and outside of
the Spectrum bandwidths, becoming more and more convoluted as it was passed
from mouth to mouth. General Claret was forced to make a statement on the
public newscasts, although she left the exact circumstances deliberately vague,
citing an accident aboard the base. She had trouble planning the short speech
because it was rare that the lives and deaths of Spectrum agents were made
public knowledge. Scarlet and Indigo had been
different – for longer than she could remember – their identities were not
secret, as was the norm for Spectrum agents. It was rather difficult for the
British aristocracy to overlook the fact that one particular title, within the
peerage, had resided in the same hands for the last two and three-quarter
centuries, and it did not take a genius to make the connection between this
Lady and the Mysteron reconstruct who served Spectrum. The secret had come out
before Claret had even been born.
In the end, Claret opted simply to say that Lady Rose was taking some
time away from her duties to mourn her father, and made the polite request that
she be left in peace. The piece was delicately worded and delivered precisely
to any journalist who cared to record it. Only on hearing her message broadcast
on the vid, later that evening, did Claret realise that her voice had trembled
throughout the short speech.
*****
“What has made you think of all this, suddenly?” Father O’Connell asked
when Indigo had calmed herself.
She gave him a wan smile. “I turned three hundred in
September, Father,” she explained. “It’s a big milestone, and I can see now why
my father wanted me to take his immortality away. I understand what drove him
to take his own life. And, of course, the war keeps me thinking about it.”
“Why is that, Rose?”
“It all started because he died,” Indigo said simply.
“Whilst my father was alive, the pacifists amongst the Mysterons could keep a
lid on things. Once he died, things fell apart, the Martian Civil War started,
and then, just to cap it all, the Mysterons re-declared War on Earth.”
“I think you’re reading too much into the timing of
the Martian War,” Father O’Connell said soothingly.
“You think so?” Indigo queried scornfully. “I was on
Mars when it all broke out. I was in the government chambers with the First
Minister when the insurrection happened. I fought in the Martian Civil War – I
was the only corporeal being there, something that protected me. I barely
escaped with my life, and that was only because they hadn’t been expecting to
find me there. The Mysterons can do a lot of damage to each other, but their
method of attack only works on other non-corporeals.
“The political dynamic hinged on him being alive.
Those who supported the war knew that whilst the two of us lived, there wasn’t
much chance of them ever winning, and a very real chance that we could find a
way to defeat them once and for all. When he died, I was a wreck and they took
their chance whilst my defences were down and there was no other person who
could fight them on the level that we did. All because I was afraid of what
would happen to me. That’s why I have to go and put it all right; put things
the way they should be.”
O’Connell paused to digest the information. When he
realised just what she had said, his eyes opened wide. “No! You can’t go and
change history just to save your father’s life!”
“Father, we are going to lose this war if I don’t stop
it now,” Indigo said firmly. “The Mysterons will succeed in their plan to
eliminate all life on Earth, unless I stop it before it starts.”
“What about Spectrum’s Temporal Orders?” the priest
argued. “Causality?”
“The brutal, drawn-out end of the
human race?” Indigo countered. “It
will happen unless I do this. I can
sense it, and I’m not the only one. The decision has been made. I leave at
midnight.”
“Then why did you come here?” the priest asked in
desperation. “What was the point in you telling me this if your mind is already
made up? You must have known that I’d try to talk you out of it.”
“I had to tell someone what we’re trying to do,” said
ominously. “In case we don’t succeed. Someone has to know that we tried.”
Major Indigo strode onto the bridge of the S.S.
Endeavour precisely on time, at 07:45, Greenwich Mean Time, having stowed
her holdall in her assigned quarters. As expected, General Claret and Colonel
Vermilion were waiting for her.
“Are you ready?” Vermilion asked her, concern evident
in his voice. He alone knew that she had been to the old church and spoken to
the priest there, and he knew how much it would have hurt her to discuss the
subject he knew must have come up. It still hurt him to think of what had
happened, what had driven the man he considered as close as family to take his
own life, but Vermilion masked his own pain in deference to her.
“Absolutely,” she replied, taking in her old friend’s
face. “You know, I’m actually excited.”
Claret shook her head at the look of childish glee on
Indigo’s face. She had never worked out why it was that, in the most serious of
circumstances, when she should be concentrating the hardest, Indigo
seemed to release her inner child. Still, Indigo was
the only person who could pull this off, and she was the best field agent
Spectrum had.
“Is your ship ready, Colonel?” Claret said aloud,
addressing Vermilion.
“Aye, ma’am, Spectrum is Green,” he replied formally.
“The Endeavour is fully supplied and overhauled, our crew is assembled
and at their posts. We’re just waiting for the word, ma’am.”
Claret reached out to shake Vermilion’s hand – a human
gesture that she was still getting used to after forty years in command of
Spectrum.
“The word is given, Colonel,” she told him. “You are
cleared to leave orbit at your leisure; once I have left the ship, of course.
Your mission briefing is as before.” She gave a wry smile. “Please don’t make
me regret giving you a ship to run around the galaxy in, Vermilion, after all
the trouble you used to cause on Earth,” she added with a wicked glint in her
purple eyes. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, ma’am,” Vermilion chuckled.
“Major Indigo will surely keep me in check.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Claret muttered.
Indigo laughed along with the senior officers. “We’ll
behave ourselves, General,” she promised.
“You had better,” Claret responded, pointing her
webbed fingers warningly at the pair. “If I hear you two have been up to your
old antics again, you’ll be back here so fast your feet won’t touch the deck.
Now, be on your way, Endeavour, and may Fortune cast her light upon
you.”
As soon as Claret had left the bridge, Vermilion
settled himself into his chair in the middle of the command centre. “Major
Indigo, please take your station and prepare to leave orbit.”
“SIG, Colonel,” Indigo acknowledged the order
faultlessly and moved to take her seat at the helm.
“Captain Cerulean,” Vermilion continued, “are the calculations complete?”
“Yes, sir,” the scientist replied from Vermilion’s
left. “The temporal coordinates are locked.”
Vermilion inclined his head towards the large African
man in thanks before moving on to his next target. “Captain Wheat, has the
structural integrity been upgraded according to the specifications for the
temporal jump?”
“Aye, sir,” Wheat, the chief
engineer confirmed. “The whole
ship has been reconfigured for this mission.”
“Excellent,” Vermilion said. “The last thing we need
would be for the ship to fall apart around us. Lieutenant Opal,” he continued,
addressing the shimmering, but otherwise empty space beside Indigo. “Is our
course plotted?”
“Aye, sir,”
replied an eager voice through the radio receiver installed in the navigation
console. “Our course to the singularity has been entered, avoiding the major
shipping lanes and patrol routes.”
“Very well,” Vermilion concluded. “Major Indigo, take us
out of orbit at one quarter light speed and continue on Opal’s course.”
“SIG, sir, one quarter light speed,” Indigo confirmed,
her fingers dancing elegantly over the controls at her fingertips.
Secluded in his quarters several hours later,
Vermilion studied the crew roster for the Endeavour. His assignment as
its commanding officer was temporary, but he felt it prudent to at least make
an effort to get to know the people that would be making this monumental
journey with him. The number of staff was minimal – just enough to cover each
of the three shifts. There was no excess, up to and including the fact that his
First Officer was doubling up as the Alpha Shift helmsman.
The crew was mainly human, as was usual with Spectrum,
with a few aliens thrown in for good measure. Two of the three scientists on
board were Centauran, the exception being the section
leader, Captain Cerulean; the Chief Engineer, Captain Wheat was Khameri, and the Beta Shift helmsman and navigator, Fuchsia
and Cerise respectively, were a Geminian partnership.
In fact, the only helmsman or navigator who was in any way Terran
was Indigo, who partnered Lieutenant Opal on the Alpha Shift.
Vermilion had never served with Geminians
before, although he knew that they were extremely efficient. The trouble was
that they were so in tune with each other that they sometimes forgot about the
people around them. They rarely left their homeworld,
or, at least, they tended to travel on Geminian
vessels. The ones that did leave the bosom of their race were often
doctor/nurse pairs looking to expand their horizons by studying interspecies
medicine. This pair were indeed a rarity, and
Vermilion was looking forward to seeing them in action. Geminians
were telepathic, but only with their partner, with whom they were bonded at
birth in a male-female paring. They lived together from the moment the youngest
was born, grew up learning the same things and always went into the same
career, working next to each other. When maturity came, the partnership became
mates; when death came, they died together, neither able to survive without the
mental presence of the other.
Khamerus Prime was populated by two different humanoid
species, both of which were known as ‘Khameri’. The
two races lived side by side in harmony. Unusually, both species were
indigenous to Khamerus, and so shared some similar
characteristics, although there were distinct differences. One of the races had
evolved in the desert areas of the planet, and tended to be tall and willowy,
averaging about seven feet tall, and were bald with dark red skin and five
fingers and a thumb on each of their hands; the others hailed from the more
temperate regions, and were shorter in stature, averaging around
five-and-a-half feet, with paler, pink skin, generally black hair and possessed
a fully prehensile tail around the same length as their body. These days, there
tended to be people of both species living in each environment, and
intermingling was possible, although not common. Wheat was one of the rare
crosses, possessing both the dark skin and extra finger of his mother’s desert
tribe and the hair and tail of his father’s people.
The Centaurans were a
familiar race to Vermilion, having served on Starbase
under General Claret for so long. There were a great many of them in Spectrum
these days, although their numbers still lagged far behind the human members,
and they were an amazing species as far as Vermilion was concerned. Their
diminutive stature and slender limbs meant that they did not make very good
foot soldiers, but their incredible adaptability and inquisitive minds made
them ideal Spectrum agents. They were an amphibious species, possessing both
lungs and gills, although the former did not develop properly until the onset
of adolescence. As such, all of the dwellings on their oceanic homeworld were underwater – and what magnificent cities
they were. Vermilion had been lucky enough, as a young man, to go down to their
capital, and he had been astounded by the almost ethereal beauty of the place.
Even the Earth Embassy, which had been built specially for the air-breathing
Humans, was created in keeping with the rest of the architecture – constructed
of white stone, with a high roof and plenty of arches. The whole city looked as
if it had been lifted out of a fairytale. He often
wondered why the Centaurans left their beautiful home
to join Spectrum.
The Centaurans appeared as
ethereal as their cities, with skin tones of varying shades of pale purple,
shifting from lilac to pale violet, and slender,
petite frames with delicate facial features framed by wispy, light hair that
grew darker with age. They were also telepaths, although their abilities were
not restricted to one individual, but their whole race. Their brainwaves were
sufficiently different from most other species that they were not able to
‘read’ them, a fact for which Vermilion had been extremely grateful for when he
encountered a whole host of extremely beautiful women on their homeworld, and had entertained some despicable thoughts
about several of them. The exception to this was, for some bizarre reason,
Mysteron constructs, and by extension, Major Indigo. She’d joked once that it
was just as well that she was perfectly capable of keeping up with a Centauran telepathic conversation, because she sure as hell
struggled with their spoken language, due to some of the syllables commonly
used being extremely difficult for Humans to imitate. An added bonus of this
happenstance, for Spectrum, was that the Centaurans
were capable of detecting Mysteron agents.
After going over the crew roster twice, Vermilion
decided to seek out his First Officer and challenge her to a chess rematch. He
still owed her at least three meals, but he was feeling lucky tonight.
*****
Indigo grinned as Vermilion ran his hand absently
through his hair, recognising the familiar gesture at once. She had seen him do
it a thousand times, just as an old friend used to do.
“What?” he demanded indignantly, scrutinising the
chess board carefully.
“Just thinking about the mission; a Svenson and a Metcalfe, fighting side by side, against the
odds, to save the world. Just as it should be.”
“I don’t get you,” Vermilion said, perplexed. He
committed himself to a move, and immediately regretted it when Indigo took the
knight he had just uncovered.
“Oh, c’mon, Jack,” Indigo said in exasperation, toying
with the piece she had just removed from the board. “You know your dad wasn’t
the first Svenson to join Spectrum.”
“Yeah? What of it?” Vermilion challenged.
“You never looked him up, did you?” she realised. “I thought
you would have done by now. All right then, I’ll give you this one gratis,
but next time you do your own research. Right at the beginning of Spectrum,
just when the first War of Nerves started, my father’s field partner was
Captain Blue. They were a great team, if somewhat troublesome, by all accounts.
They didn’t always play by the rules.” Indigo grinned. “Remind you of anyone
you know?”
“Us, not playing by the rules?” Vermilion said innocently, moving his bishop into a
vaguely threatening position. “When have we ever done anything that might be
considered as outside the rules, or contravened orders, or broken every single
regulation in the manual?”
“Quite,” Indigo agreed, laying on the sarcasm with a
trowel. “What you evidently have been too lazy to discover is that Captain Blue
is your great, great, great, great, great, great-grandfather, Adam Svenson.” She counted the ‘great’s on her fingers. “And my
Godfather,” she added for good measure. She fished around in her bag and pulled
out an old book. She flicked through the pages – paper pages! – until she found what it was she was looking for. She handed
the book to him and tapped one of the pictures with her fingernail very gently.
“Don’t touch the photos, whatever you do,” she warned
him dramatically. “You’ll get fingerprints on them if you do and damage the
photo-paper.”
“Real photos? On paper?” Vermilion was
incredulous. “I didn’t think these existed outside of museums!” He touched the
very tip of one finger to the paper page of the book.
“Yes, well, be careful,” she reiterated. “That is me,
Mom, Dad and your- God, I hate the word ‘ancestors’. Makes
me feel old.”
“Rose, you are old,” Vermilion pointed out. “Is that kid you? You
haven’t changed much. But…” He lifted the photo album up, tilted it back and
forth as if trying to make the image perform some kind of metamorphosis, then
set it back onto his lap.
“Now do you see why I remembered your face from the Europa?
I couldn’t believe how much you look like Adam, eight generations later. I tell
you, you could pass for him, if we ever needed to travel to the
twenty-eighties.”
“And his wife looks like my Aunt Carole!” Vermilion
exclaimed.
“Carole? No way! Adam’s wife was called Karen, or Symphony if she was on duty. She was an
Angel.”
Vermilion frowned. “But the Angels all have names of
precious stones.”
“Not back then, they didn’t,” Indigo said, her face
more animated than it had been for a long time. “That only came in 2080, after
my mother died and they decided that they needed a way of systematically naming
the Angels. The first six were Destiny, Rhapsody, Symphony, Harmony, Melody and
Prophecy. Rhapsody was my mother. Originally there were five Angels, before I
was born. Prophecy was brought in as a replacement whilst my Mom was on maternity
leave, but they decided that the team worked so well with six pilots that she
stayed on.”
She sat beside him and turned the pages of the album
back until she reached a picture of six women, wearing what were recognisably
Angel uniforms, even now, three centuries later. “I knew I had one of them,”
Indigo said triumphantly. “Destiny is the blonde on the left, that’s Melody
beside her, then Harmony, the next ones you know, then Prophecy on the end. The
photo below is the captains at the time; Magenta, Ochre, Blue, Scarlet, Green
and Grey.”
She stretched across him to move her second queen onto
his back row. “Checkmate,” she said smugly.
Vermilion checked the board in dismay. His king,
immediately threatened by the queen, was pinned in by the other queen and a
bishop. The knight that Indigo had taken in the previous move had been the only
thing that would have been able to intercept the queen.
At that moment, the klaxon signalling the shift-change
sounded.
“Have we really been that long?” he asked, checking his
watch, then looking at the state of the table beside
the chessboard. Several mugs cluttered the area, along with the vestiges of
their meal, which had been a stir-fry with several kinds of Centauran
vegetables.
“Go on, I’ll tidy this lot up,” Indigo said
affectionately, gesturing to the pile of crockery.
“I can’t let you do that,” he argued half-heartedly.
“You need to get some sleep too, before tomorrow.”
“Only a couple of hours,” Indigo reminded him,
returning the chess pieces to their container. “Now go.”
Vermilion stifled a yawn. “All right,” he conceded. “Goodnight, Rose.”
“Night, Jack,” she replied.
Indigo waited until Vermilion had left before
acknowledging Opal’s presence. She had seen the Mysteron enter just before he
left; to her, the being appeared as a brilliant green glow, the same colour as she saw in the aura of replicants, but to
human eyes, the being was invisible unless it wished to be seen.
‘How much do you remember from the beginning?’ she asked it as she piled the plates and cups onto a
tray.
‘Not much,’
Opal confessed. ‘I was very young then; I’m not much older than you, Rose.
One of my first true memories of the War is my mother’s death.’
Indigo, still hazy on the Mysterons’ method of
reproduction, knew that her mind was translating the term ‘mother’ from
something she didn’t really understand. The remark spiked her curiosity,
though.
‘What happened to it?’ she asked.
‘It was killed by our own kind,’ Opal told her sadly, but with a hint of pride in the
thought. ‘It helped Captain Black fight against their control, and protected
him from the Group whilst he carried out his own intentions when he was
directed to kidnap you when you were seven. Its protection allowed Captain
Black take control of his body and to hand you over to Spectrum, instead of
taking you for the Mysterons. Without its assistance, Black may not have
managed to resist the Group for as long as he did.’
‘Your mother
was killed for protecting me?’ Indigo
asked incredulously. ‘My God, I never thought about anything like that. It
never occurred to me before.’
‘The Group was very angry,’ Opal recalled. ‘Black was punished and my mother
suffered torture for many days before it was executed; but its resolution to do
what was right, even though it knew what the outcome would be was what
convinced me that the war was truly unjust, and that I could not stand by and
watch the others annihilate your mother’s species.’
‘I probably owe my life to your mother,’ Indigo thought. ‘I wish I could thank her.’
‘You already have,’ Opal responded, overlooking, as it always did, Indigo’s confused
pronoun. ‘By surviving to bring the war to an end and allowing peace to come
to our people, its sacrifice was not in vain. That would have been thanks
enough for my mother. Please do not be discomforted by this knowledge. My
mother was a martyr to the cause of peace. A great many of our people were
swayed by her actions. Perhaps not initially, but the seed of doubt was
planted.’
Indigo nodded thoughtfully, her eyes falling back to
the photo album, still open on the table. The people in those pictures were all
now long dead, and some had died at the hands of the Mysterons, but how many
more people might have died if not for Opal’s ‘mother’? Would there even be an
Earth left for them to save now? It certainly wouldn’t be Indigo
saving it, at any rate. She remembered the incident Opal had referred to; knew
that Captain Black’s mission had been to take her and transfer his own powers
to her. She would have been the Mysterons’ primary agent on Earth, under their
control and doing their bidding; and with the power she wielded, Indigo knew
that the Mysterons could have made good on their threat to exterminate the
human race.
‘I am proud of my mother for its actions, Major,’ Opal insisted. ‘Please, I did not mean to distress
you with this.’
‘You haven’t,’
Indigo reassured it; ‘thank you for telling me.
Shall we continue?’
There was a slight shimmer in Opal’s amorphous form
that Indigo knew from long association with other Mysterons to be their way of
expressing nerves. However, Opal only delayed briefly before replying. ‘Yes,
of course,’ it said. ‘Have you told Colonel Vermilion yet?’
Indigo scowled. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘He’d
only object if he knew the full details and make a fuss. It’s better off this
way.’
‘If you say so, Major,’ Opal acquiesced. ‘You know Humans better than I
do.’
Indigo ceased her tidying, and Opal moved forward. Its brilliant green
glow surrounded her, and she closed her eyes and opened her mind to let it in.
‘Breathe,’
Opal chided her, with a hint of amusement in the thought.
Indigo hadn’t even realised that she was holding her breath, to avoid
inhaling the Mysteron. Experimentally, she drew a breath; everything felt
normal, and Opal did not appear to be in any distress. Then, without warning,
the Mysteron joined with her, overwhelming her momentarily with senses far in
excess of her own. Information flooded into her mind faster than she could cope
with the influx, and it took all her strength not to pass out. Slowly, drawing
on her many years of self-taught discipline coupled with some Centauran practices that Claret had taught her, she blocked
out the unfamiliar sensations. Almost immediately, she felt Opal’s regret and
anguish, as keenly as if it were her own. There was no longer any need for
communication between them – they were as close to one and the same individual
as they were ever going to get; gradually, Opal introduced its own senses into
Indigo’s mind, allowing it time to become accustomed to the additional input.
Suddenly, they understood the potential the Mysterons had seen in her all those
years ago, the being she could have become if not for Opal’s mother and Captain
Black.
Their eyes flew open, burning their characteristic luminescent green,
but with an intensity she had never managed alone. The
power of the Mysteron coursed through her veins, exponentially enhancing the
abilities she already possessed.
Vermilion let out a deep sigh as he lowered the lights in his quarters
and prepared for bed. He didn’t know why he still tortured himself by staying
so close to Indigo, trying to persuade himself that the platonic friendship
they had was what he wanted, that he didn’t feel for her what he once had. The
time that he could have pursued anything more was gone, the physical age
difference too large. At fifty-nine, he was too old to pursue a woman who was
physically speaking around thirty years his junior, someone who would be forced
to suffer when he succumbed to the inevitability of death. If she even felt the
same way.
Enough was enough. After the mission was over, and Scarlet was alive
again, he would leave quietly and stop torturing himself.
*****
Vermilion frowned as he entered the bridge at the
start of Alpha Shift. Both Indigo and Cerulean were at their stations, along
with Lieutenant Bisque from Engineering and, he noted with interest, Doctor
Chartreuse was also there, seated calmly one of the spare seats alongside his
own. Opal, however, appeared to be missing. Of course, the lieutenant could be
there, but normally it had the decency to distort the air around it to appear
visible to the humanoid crew of the Endeavour. Damn the Mysteron, if it
had vanished!
He looked up at the black hole on the main viewer as
he made his way to his seat. They had arrived, and it was now or never.
“Is everything ready for the jump?” he asked the crew.
There was a chorus of assent from the officers.
“Major, are you prepared?”
Indigo turned briefly, allowing him to glimpse her
glowing eyes. “Aye, sir,” she replied, sounding oddly distorted. It took Vermilion a moment to realise that
three voices had spoken in unison: one from Indigo herself and both Indigo’s
and Opal’s from Opal’s speaker. “We are ready.”
We.
Vermilion should have realised exactly where Opal was. The ability to make the
ship time-travel to an exact destination largely relied on the Mysterons’
ability to see in four dimensions. It was an ability that Indigo shared to some
degree, but not well enough for their mission to succeed, not enough to sense
the distortions of the black hole that would send them back through the years.
It had been her idea to enlist Opal’s help. It was one of the Mysterons who did
not support the war, and was willing to cooperate and serve with Spectrum in
order to put an end to it. She had never mentioned anything like this in her
explanation of coordinating the manoeuvre, however. He would have forbidden it
absolutely, which was why she had probably not mentioned it to him. Damn
her!
“Execute slingshot manoeuvre, Major,” Vermilion
responded smoothly, not letting his discomfort show.
“SIG,” Indigo/Opal replied.
Indigo drew a deep breath and closed their eyes,
reaching out and feeling the gravity well of the singularity, probing the
distortion in time and space that it caused. The helm responded to their
thoughts, and the starship accelerated, heading ever
nearer to the event horizon. One wrong move now and they were history, along
with the rest of the crew.
Although they had made a show of carefully calculating
forces and planning flight paths, Indigo and Opal had never intended to use
them and they threw the Endeavour into the slingshot using pure
instinct. They heard the bridge explode into a cacophony of shouts as they
deviated from the plan, although it was probably by no more than a few feet, or
a slight difference in speed; all their concentration was on getting the Endeavour
through this intact and in the right time, and they stood a much better chance
of doing that using the superior Mysteron fourth-dimension sense than computers
and mathematical models.
“Colonel!” Cerulean shouted as the ship entered into a low and
rapid orbit around the black hole. “They have entered the slingshot closer to
the event horizon than calculated.”
“Damn them!” Vermilion cursed vehemently, pounding his
fist on the arm of his chair. Why hadn’t he seen this coming? Why hadn’t he
learned that Indigo would never change, and would always continue to do things
her own way? What use was it in his outranking her if she didn’t listen to him
once in a while? They had been friends for so long that he often forgot that
she was different to the rest of the human race, overlooked the fact that she
had luminous green eyes, telepathy, telekinesis and other words starting in ‘tele-’. The bright green rings sweeping the helm controls,
however, reminded him sharply that she was not entirely human. Two rings he
could have just about coped with, their presence generally being the sign that
Opal was performing some task, but four interlocked rings was a little too
unnerving for him, especially considering that Indigo’s eyes were shut and head
leant back against the headrest, as if she were resting.
He was about to voice a question to Cerulean, but
suddenly, the universe seemed to change. Cerulean seemed to be moving in
freeze-frame, as did Bisque. Only the combined Mysteron being posing as his
friend and first officer seemed unaffected physically by the phenomenon, the
interlocking rings continuing to sweep the helm console unhampered by the time
distortion for what seemed like several minutes, but could easily have been
seconds, until the bridge seemed to return to normal and a sickening jolt in
his stomach told Vermilion that the ship had decelerated, ever so slightly out
of synch with the inertial dampeners.
“Has it worked?” Vermilion asked his officers.
“Certainly,” Indigo/Opal responded instantly. “We have
arrived on schedule.”
“Confirmed,” Cerulean agreed in a shaky voice. “Scans
of the neighbouring systems show planetary position consistent with December
2336. The computer will need a moment to extrapolate the exact date.”
“December sixteenth,” Indigo interjected. “Twelve
hundred thirty hours, Earth GMT.”
“Cerulean?”
“Exactly right, sir,” the scientists confirmed in
surprise. “To the minute, according to the computer.”
“Set a course back to Earth, then,” Vermilion ordered.
“Standard cruising speed.”
“SIG,” Indigo/Opal responded. “Executing
now.”
“And then I want to see you… two… in my office,” he
added. “Immediately. Cerulean, you have the bridge.”
“Of course,” ‘they’ replied, setting the automatic
pilot and following Vermilion to a door at the back of the bridge, leading to
the Colonel’s private office.
Vermilion didn’t say another word until the door was
safely shut and Indigo was sat on the chair before his desk. He decided not to
take his own seat, but paced the small room behind his first officer until she
turned. Her face was serene, eyes glowing gently.
He wheeled on her with hard eyes. “Why didn’t you tell
me what the pair of you were planning? You can’t just
undermine my authority by making a decision that could have put the whole crew
in jeopardy. The chain of command is there for a reason – I am responsible for
this crew and this ship, not to mention this mission.”
“You wouldn’t have agreed,” Indigo said, her voice
taking on an ethereal quality. “This was the only way that the journey would be
successful, if we combined our abilities. The computer couldn’t compensate for
the natural fluctuations in the gravity well – we could and did.”
“You’re damn right I wouldn’t have agreed,” Vermilion
raged. “I would have thought that sheer common sense would have prevented you
from doing something so stupid! Christ, Rose, you spend your entire life
avoiding exactly what you’ve just done. Did you ever think that this could be
just the chance the Mysterons were looking for to take you once and for all?
What if something else sneaked into your head along with Opal?”
“There was no danger,” the being responded in the same
even tone. “We both took every caution to ensure that no additional minds
merged with our own.”
Vermilion looked deeply sceptical as he tried and
failed to read his friend’s face. Even her eyes were different now, although he
would never be able to explain the change.
“Are you even still in there, Rose?” he asked
desperately, his spleen vented for the most part, and concern for his friend
taking over.
“I am still Rose,” she replied. “Just
as I am still Opal. I know that you do not understand fully what we have
become, more than our separate components. Our awareness of the universe has
never been surpassed by the Group. You are correct, Colonel: this is what the
Group desired, many years ago, and with good reason. However, I do feel that it
is time for us to divide ourselves, for the time being.”
With that, she fell silent and her head drooped
forwards as if she was asleep. Vermilion watched, unable to look away, as the
air around Indigo shimmered with Opal’s characteristic disturbance. As the
distortion grew away from the tiny body and coalesced into a vague sphere,
Indigo slumped in her seat. Alarmed, Vermilion leaped the few feet that
separated them and checked for a pulse and breathing. Both were present, if a
little ragged, and even as he checked her over, she regained consciousness. Vermilion
felt his heart skip a beat as she met his eyes, dazed but back to normal. It
was definitely her behind those bright green eyes now, not whatever she and
Opal had become together.
“Please don’t blame Opal,” she begged him in a
whisper. “I pulled rank.”
“Oh, now see, that I can believe,” he responded with a
sigh of relief, pulling her closer to him, as if embracing her would make it
more real for him. He only held her for a few seconds before turning towards
the non-corporeal member of his crew.
“You’re dismissed, Lieutenant,” he said, not unkindly.
“Please return to navigation.”
“SIG,” Opal
replied through the radio receiver on Vermilion’s desk. Promptly, the Mysteron
vanished through the door leading back to the bridge.
“What am I going to do with you?” Vermilion
groaned. Finally allowing himself to
sit, he walked wearily around his desk and lowered himself into his chair with
a thump. He ran a hand through his still-blond hair as he contemplated Indigo
and wondered, not for the first time, why two such opposites as himself and
Indigo had remained such close friends after all this time. People had often
commented on what a striking team they made when they were field partners; the
tall, blond, tanned man and the tiny, raven-haired, pale woman always raised
eyebrows. Only after people got to know them did they realise that their
equally opposing personalities complemented each other. Whilst he looked like
the last of the Vikings, Vermilion was gentle and patient, whereas Indigo,
underneath decades of self-control, was every commanding officer’s worst
nightmare; impetuous and unafraid of disobeying orders when she felt she was
right, coupled with a quick temper that matched her late father’s in its
ferocity. It was exactly those exasperating qualities that would make her an
excellent colonel one day, when she allowed herself to be promoted, but
Vermilion understood her reasons for refusing any further promotions, ones that
would take her away from the field whilst she was still more than capable of
serving.
“Put me up in front of a firing squad?” she responded,
recalling something she had been told as a teenager. That incident had been
before the discovery of the electron rifle, of course.
“Don’t even joke about that,” Vermilion said,
scandalised. “Besides, we don’t do that these days.”
“I know.”
“Forgive me for asking, Indie, but there’s something
else about your plan that bothers me,” Vermilion said, narrowing his eyes at
his First Officer. “Something else that you’ve left hazy.”
“Oh, what’s that?” Indigo asked innocently, knowing
full well what he was about to say. She knew exactly which part of the plan of
action was still unclear.
“How do you plan on getting onto Starbase,
exactly?” Vermilion inquired. “It’s not as if we’re going to be able to glide
up to an airlock and walk on. You and I, at least, are already there. Granted,
I’ve changed since then, they might not recognise me straight away, but you
haven’t.”
“You’ve not changed that much,” she replied, her tone
gentle, but not as if she was trying to flatter him or butter him up, preparing
him for something she knew he wouldn’t like.
He fixed her with a hard stare, until she relented.
“Opal’s going to help me,” she told him. “It can
teleport me from the ship to Starbase if we come to a
stop just outside their sensor range. We’re lucky in a way; next year, the
sensors will be upgraded, and we wouldn’t be able to pull this off. Once I’m on
board, and they know where I’m from, you shouldn’t have a problem with coming
on board yourself, if necessary. I don’t recommend that we do too much mingling
with the crew of Starbase in this time, even though
by this time tomorrow, hopefully, our knowledge of the future won’t be worth a
dime.”
“Amen to that. Doesn’t mean I like your plan,” he
added, “but at least you have thought it through.”
It took them another ship’s day to make the return
trip, having to make similar detours as during the trip out to the black hole.
They couldn’t risk coming across any of Spectrum’s ships of this era before
arrival at Starbase. There would be too many awkward
questions. Chief Engineer Wheat fretted over fluctuations in structural
integrity caused by a malfunctioning power conduit in the field emitters.
Although the fault wasn’t causing them any problems at the time, without
repairs they wouldn’t survive the return journey. There was no hiding anything
now, no possibility that Indigo could just go in and back out again unnoticed –
they had to dock and make repairs at Starbase.
Captain Cerulean compiled a sensor report for the
journey, noting particularly that the gravity field of the black hole had
fluctuated during the slingshot orbit. Calculations indicated that had Indigo
and Opal used the original flight path, the Endeavour would have emerged
from the ether approximately a hundred years earlier than planned – if it
survived at all. It didn’t stop Vermilion smarting over them having left him
out of the loop, but it slightly diminished his desire to court-marshal Indigo
when they got back to their own time.
A ship’s day after leaving the vicinity of the
singularity, Indigo brought the ship to a stop, just beyond the horizon of Starbase’s sensors.
Major Scarlet was careful not to attract anyone’s
attention as he moved through the corridors of Starbase
and moved into those of Cloudbase, heading towards the very quarters that
Vermilion had found Indigo in the day before. After the horribly brief
conversation with his daughter during which she had destroyed what was left of
his spirit, he wanted to be alone, and these rooms were the best ones on Starbase for that purpose. No one came down here any more; no one had any reason to, except him and his
daughter. His mind automatically steered him to the door he wanted, and he
punched in the security code without looking at the panel.
It took him a while to realise that he wasn’t alone.
From an armchair that inexplicably still furnished the room, two circles of
green light shone into the darkness. Even as he saw this, he felt a wave of
nausea rise in his stomach. Despite his attack of the blues, so to speak, he
quickly put two and two together. The presence of a Mysteron on the base pushed
all other concerns from his mind, and he reached for his gun, only to find that
it wasn’t in its holster. Why should it be, on Starbase?
“I’m glad you came here,” the Mysteron said
conversationally, her voice devastatingly recognisable. “It was a toss-up
between here and next door, and I would have hated to have to come looking for
you, especially considering what I’ve just done to you upstairs.”
“What do you want?” Scarlet demanded wearily. “There’s
been no threat announced yet.”
“Threat?”
As the Mysteron spoke, Scarlet’s mind suddenly clicked
that he had just seen his daughter, not ten minutes ago, alive and well. Unless the Mysterons had changed their modus operandi…
He felt, belatedly, the Mysteron probing at his mind,
and he pushed her away. It occurred to him as he did so that a) he wouldn’t
have been able to block her out if she really wanted to stay, and b) that
gentle touch was definitely that of his daughter, and although there was
something different about it, there was none of the malevolence present that he
would expect from a Mysteron Agent.
“It’s not what you think,” Indigo said quickly. “This
might be a little hard to swallow, but I’m from the future.”
“You’re a Mysteron,” he said weakly, still reeling
from the reaction of his inbuilt detector.
“No… oh, I know what it is,” she said with dawning
comprehension. For a moment, she grew very still, then, before Scarlet’s eyes,
a phosphorescent green haze seemed to seep from the pores of her skin,
coalescing into a free form hanging in midair as it
moved away from her. The dizziness ceased immediately.
“I hitched a lift with Opal here, so that I could get on
board Starbase without question,” Indigo explained,
waving a hand towards the green haze. “I thought that there might be a few too
many questions if I tried to come in through a more conventional route.”
Although she was making no further attempts to probe
his thoughts, Indigo had completely lowered her shields and opened her mind for
his scrutiny.
“I’m from the future,” she repeated. “Thirty-six years
from now, in fact.”
Scarlet knew that she was speaking the truth. There
was no way that she could lie to him whilst she was so unguarded. “Why?” he
asked simply.
Indigo stood. The full foot separating their heights
meant that she had to look a long way up into his face, but she did so without
complaint and took both of his hands in hers.
“I have to repair a mistake I made,” she whispered, a
smile playing at her lips. “Happy birthday.”
Scarlet’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean…?”
The smile broadened, and her bright eyes sparkled in
the dark room. “Yes, I do,” she said simply. “C’mon, we’d best be somewhere
less remote, just in case it all goes wrong.”
Having relocated to Scarlet’s current quarters, they
sat side by side on the settee in the living area.
“Opal will keep an eye on us whilst we are linked,”
Indigo told him. “It’ll raise the alarm if we get into trouble, but I don’t
think we will.”
‘It never hurts to be cautious,’ Opal said, a note of humour
in its thought.
“Opal?” Scarlet queried the name. “I thought that Mysterons
didn’t have names.”
“It’s a colour code,” Indigo said, rolling her eyes.
“This is Lieutenant Opal. It’s the navigation officer on the Endeavour.”
When Scarlet didn’t say anything in return, Indigo continued, “Opal’s mother
saved my life in New York, that time when I was a kid. It protected Captain
Black from the other Mysterons whilst he handed me over to Spectrum.”
Scarlet only nodded. Unlike Indigo, who embraced the
Mysteron part of her heritage now that the conflict was over and the peaceful
faction was in control on Mars, he preferred to distance himself from the
Mysterons as much as possible, and still struggled with the fact that their two
races were now at peace with each other. In his eyes, the Mysterons were, and
always would be enemies, but this new information did not sit well with his
stereotype of the race.
Indigo could see that he was struggling to assimilate
the information. “Don’t worry too much about it just now,” she advised. “Just
relax.”
She reached out and gently laid her hands on either
side of his face. Her eyes closed, and for a moment Scarlet studied her
tranquil expression; felt her at peace with herself, as she had not been for
many years. Within seconds, though, her features took on a worried look,
although Scarlet barely had time to notice before something happened. Fire
raced along every nerve in his body, searing pain lancing though him, and he
could not prevent a cry escaping him, a cry echoed by his daughter. Her hands
felt like branding irons against his face, her presence like wires in his
brain. Surely this was wrong – this couldn’t be what she had intended to do to
him…
As suddenly as it had started, everything stopped. An
icy chill was left where there had only been flame, so cold…
*****
Lieutenant Opal turned to the only person it knew who could help its
friend. Unfortunately, when it found her, she seemed to be rather upset, and
Opal hesitated. She had always appeared so strong, that it had trouble
associating the hunched-up figure that was sobbing into a cushion with Major
Indigo. At first it wondered, absurdly, if it had the wrong room, as if that could
be anyone other than Rose Metcalfe, but the bubbling fish tank in the corner of
the room satisfied it that this was the correct place.
“Major Indigo?”
It intruded quietly into her mind, so as not to disturb her.
“Go ‘way,” she said aloud, indistinctly, her words
muffled by the cushion.
“Major, I need your help,” Opal insisted, slightly more urgently. “Your
father needs your help.”
That got her attention. Opal felt her reach out
towards her father, and realise that something had happened.
“What…?”
Opal explained everything in a telepathic burst of
images and memories, rather than in the words that Indigo generally preferred.
She was already on her feet and out of the door before it had finished. She
turned from her door to Scarlet’s in a practiced move, unlocking the door using
telekinesis rather than typing the code in manually.
Indigo did a slight double take when she saw herself
and her father on the sofa, both unconscious. Despite Opal’s information, she
had not quite been prepared to see her own face.
“Indigo to Sickbay,” she called out, activating the
comm. system by vocal command. “Medical emergency in Major Scarlet’s quarters.
Two teams required on the double!”
“What seems to be the problem,
Major?” Doctor Mint’s voice
sounded throughout the room.
“No time to explain, it’s a long story,” she said
frantically, checking both casualties for life signs. “Just get the teams
here.”
The med-techs arrived in no time, carrying two gurneys
between them. Indigo stepped back, allowing two of them to lift Scarlet
effortlessly onto one of the gurneys whilst the other two did the same with the
unconscious Indigo.
“’Ere, what’s goin’
on?” one of the techs blurted when he saw the patient, whose eyes fluttered
slightly. Indigo stepped up to the
side of the gurney, and shielded her eyes from the bright lights above. A hand
reached out to grasp hers as her double’s eyes finally opened, struggling
against oblivion. Bright blue eyes.
“Did it work?” she whispered urgently.
“Yes, it did,” Indigo answered reassuringly, knowing instinctively that
she was telling the truth.
Doctor Verdant hurried over to assist his colleague as
the orderlies wheeled Scarlet and Indigo into Sickbay. Mint barely afforded him
a glance before turning his attention to his hand-held medical scanner, which
was currently pointed at Scarlet. The device whistled alarmingly and Mint hit
the side of it in irritation at the obviously incorrect reading and rescanned
his patient.
Verdant pointed his own scanner at Indigo the moment
she entered Sickbay, and in his hurry to check his patient, he never noticed
the officer who accompanied the unconscious pair. The scanner let out a
piercing whistle, matching that of Mint’s instrument.
“That can’t be right,” Verdant said, studying the
readout.
“No retrometabolism?” the visitor remarked. “It’s
exactly right.”
Both Mint and Verdant looked up sharply at the
familiar voice. Major Indigo was standing in the doorway, out of the way of the
two doctors. Verdant looked back at his patient, then back at the figure in the
doorway in disbelief.
“Quarantine them!” Mint shouted, coming to his senses
first. “If their retrometabolism has shut down, they’re susceptible to
infection.”
The med-techs obediently whisked the two patients to
one of the quarantine suites. Both doctors wheeled on Indigo.
“Would you mind explaining?” Verdant
demanded, arms folded.
“General Claret?”
“What is it, Blue?” Claret snapped at her aide. She had been in a foul
temper ever since Major Indigo had taken off without authorisation four days
ago, and there seemed little chance of it abating in the near future.
“Doctor Mint reports that Majors Scarlet and Indigo have been
discovered unconscious in Major Scarlet’s quarters,” Lieutenant Blue reported
timidly. “He also says that you should get down to Sickbay as soon as possible.
He doesn’t want to speculate until you’ve ‘seen for yourself’, he says. Something about Indigo.”
“Nothing more?” Claret growled. “Very well, I’ll meet him there in five minutes.”
“SIG,” Blue said, moving to restore the audio connection to Sickbay
when another light flashed on his board.
“General, we’re being hailed by the… the S.S. Endeavour,” Blue
advised, reading his display. “It’s showing a Spectrum registry, but there’s no
record of it in the computer. I’m interfacing with their computer for the
registry details. They’ve only just crossed the sensor horizon, but it’s close enough.”
There was a slight pause, then: “That can’t be right!” Blue exclaimed,
his dark eyes wide with astonishment. “General, the registry is showing a
launch date of July 10th, 2367!”
Claret frowned. “The tri-centenary? That’s not
for another thirty-one years! Who’s commanding, dare I ask?”
Blue touched a few controls. The poor young man looked utterly
confused. “Colonel… Vermilion.”
“‘Something about Indigo’,” Claret repeated softly. “Things are
starting to fall into place. And, of course, you never get one without the
other. Well, put him on, Lieutenant.”
Claret turned to the vidscreen, which
promptly came to life, displaying the familiar countenance of Vermilion, aged
by many years but still very recognisable.
“Welcome to 2336, Colonel Vermilion,” Claret greeted him as her
suspicions were confirmed.
“Thank you, General,” Vermilion replied with a smile after only a slight
hesitation, caught out by Claret’s salutation. “I’m sorry if we surprised
you.”
“That’s certainly one way to put it,” Claret said dryly. “Is your First
Officer aboard Starbase, by any chance?”
A fleeting expression of concern passed over Vermilion’s face, quickly
suppressed. “Yes, ma’am, she is. I apologise for her intruding, but we
thought it best if she completed her mission before we revealed ourselves.”
“‘Her mission’? Is there any chance you might enlighten me as to what’s going on?” she
asked acerbically.
“I’ll gladly explain as much as possible, General,”
Vermilion said. “Our SIF suffered some damage during the trip, and we can’t
return until it’s fixed. Could we dock at Starbase to
make repairs?”
Claret nodded. Making any kind of trip with a malfunctioning SIF was
dangerous. “We have some space available. I’ll get Lieutenant Blue to send
details to your helmsman.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Vermilion said politely. “I’ll see you when we dock.”
“SIG. Starbase out.”
The screen winked off and Claret turned to Blue. “I want them in
quarantine,” she ordered. “They can borrow engineers if necessary, but no one
from the junior staff – colour-coded engineers only. I only want Colonel
Vermilion to leave the ship, none of the rest of his crew.”
“SIG,” Blue acknowledged, keying instructions into his console,
thoroughly confused.
*****
Vermilion practically ran to Sickbay, the moment that Security released
him following a short discussion on the ground rules with Claret, rules he had
agreed to in an instant. The nurse that he almost ploughed into did a double
take before pointing him towards one of the isolation rooms furthest from the
main entrance and wards. The windows of the ward were blacked out, but the door
to the atrium was not locked, as it would be if there were quarantine patients
in there. The door opened obediently as he approached, revealing Doctors Mint
and Verdant deep in conversation, their backs turned to the observation window
so that the occupants could not lip-read what they were saying. They looked up,
startled.
“Colonel Vermilion, I presume?” Verdant asked
smoothly, taking in the newcomer with apparent ease. “We were told to expect
you.”
“How are they?” Vermilion asked. Scarlet and Indigo appeared fine, to his eyes, both reclining on beds
and chatting to each other.
“They are in perfect health,” Mint answered, stealing
a glance at his colleague. “Fortunately, their immune systems appear to be
functional against current diseases, otherwise they would be facing a difficult
time over the next few months. If it had not been,” he continued, seeing
Vermilion’s blank look, “they would have no defences against any disease that
has developed over the last three centuries. They would be facing an intense
regime of immunisations and supplementary medication until their systems caught
up, otherwise.”
“It worked then?” Vermilion pressed. “They’re both
normal now?”
Any reply was drowned out by an alarm shrieking from
the console behind the doctors. Indigo had leaped from her bed upon seeing
Vermilion, and was now standing at the door separating the quarantine ward from
this small room. Her absence from the sensors had set the alarm off. With a
sigh, Verdant silenced the alarm and opened the door.
“Jack!” Indigo cried, rushing towards him, her blue
eyes shining with joy. “Jack, it’s worked. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Vermilion lifted her off her feet as she approached
him and spun her around. “I knew you could do it,” he said as he set her back
down again. He swept a piece of her dark hair away from her eyes gently, and he
saw clearly for the first time, that she was very comfortable in his arms.
Suddenly, without conscious thought, their mouths met in a tender kiss that
seemed to last eternity.
They broke apart at the sound of a slight cough.
Scarlet was also up, leaning casually against the frame of the open door.
“I thought you said you weren’t with anyone?” he said
mildly.
Indigo turned, still in Vermilion’s arms. She had the
good grace to look slightly embarrassed, with a delicate blush highlighting her
youthful features.
“I er… I wasn’t,” she
replied.
“Paul!” Vermilion exclaimed, his face alight with
happiness at seeing his friend alive and well. “You don’t seem surprised.”
Scarlet shrugged. “I’m not,” he said. “It’s obvious to
anyone with eyes that the two of you are crazy about each other, even now, in
your counterparts.”
“And I thought I was hiding it so well,” Vermilion
said ruefully. “You sure were,” he added, giving Indigo a little squeeze.
“I thought I was,” she commented. “Maybe not, though.”
“Not to me, my love,” Scarlet told her affectionately.
“You should have learned by now that you can’t hide anything from your daddy.”
“Don’t tell them – us,” Indigo said, horrified
suddenly. She looked around Vermilion to ensure that the doctors realised that
they were included in the request.
“They slipped out whilst you were otherwise occupied,”
Scarlet said. “Don’t worry – I’ve kept my silence this long. I knew you’d
figure it out eventually. Now, if you really don’t want them to find you out, I
suggest that you separate.”
Something in the tone of Scarlet’s voice made the
couple spring apart, just moments before the main doors opened to admit General
Claret, followed by Major Indigo and a young Captain Vermilion. Claret seemed
to take in the presence of the duplicates with relative ease, compared to
Captain Vermilion, who flanked his Commanding Officer protectively whilst
staring at his older self.
“Majors, I am told that you are both in perfect health
and can be released from Sickbay,” Claret said, with what looked suspiciously
like a smile. “Obviously, however, I can’t allow you, the ‘older’ Major Indigo,
nor Colonel Vermilion, to freely walk the base. There
would be too many questions asked.”
“I understand,” Colonel Vermilion replied. “We will
confine ourselves to the Endeavour whilst the SIF repairs are carried
out.”
“We need not be quite that drastic,” Claret said. “I
realise that there are things that need to be said between the five of you,
especially considering that there has been quite a dramatic turning point in
your lives. I would ask that you restrict yourselves to the Endeavour,
your quarters here on Starbase and the corridors in
between – no further.”
“Of course,” Colonel Vermilion responded.
“Also,” Claret continued, “I would like to be fully
briefed, as much as possible, on what has occurred. I am, therefore, calling a
meeting tomorrow at oh-eight hundred hours in the main Conference room. You may
all consider yourselves invited. Major Scarlet, Majors Indigo, you are all off
duty until then. Colonel Vermilion, please co-ordinate your repairs with my
engineers, according to the rules laid down earlier.”
“SIG.” The reluctant response was uttered in chorus by the
five officers, with the two pairs of counterparts speaking in synch.
“Actually, I’ve had an idea,” Claret said with a
slight smile. “I know how much you like going back to your old Cloudbase
quarters, Major Indigo. I think that all those rooms are still connected to the
main systems, and lighting two of them wouldn’t cause my engineers a problem.
That solution will keep you on Starbase and away from
most of the crew. There’s even the old conference room down there that we could
use.”
The elder Vermilion looked at his first officer,
seeing her shining eyes pleading with him to agree. He had to admit that he
liked the idea of using those old rooms himself.
“It would be an honour, ma’am,” he replied graciously.
Claret nodded briskly. “I’ll make the arrangements and
send an escort for you when the quarters are ready.” She spun smartly on her
heel and left the room.
“I think we need to get some names sorted, if you’re
staying for a while,” Scarlet said, slouching back on the doorframe. “We could
just about cope with these two,” he indicated to the two Vermilions, “Captain and
Colonel, but you two are going to be more difficult.”
“My rank isn’t worth much here, Paul,” Colonel
Vermilion said. “I’m quite happy to drop my colour-code for the time being.”
“As am I,” the blue-eyed Indigo agreed. “That is, if
you two don’t mind.”
“If it makes life easier,” the green-eyed Indigo
replied, “I don’t mind.”
“Sure,” Captain Vermilion shrugged.
*****
Rose woke to find the room shaking. Roused from her
sleep, it took her a moment to realise that it wasn’t the room at all, but her
that was moving.
“I’m awake,” she mumbled as she turned to see Jack.
Jack released Rose and helped her to sit up. “Hurry
up, Rose, or we’ll be late.”
Rose frowned. “Late? What time is it?”
“07:50,” Jack replied urgently.
Rose leaped out of bed and pulled the spare uniform
she had brought from the Endeavour out of her closet. “Why did you let
me sleep so late?” she demanded as she stripped off her nightie.
Jack averted his eyes politely. “I thought you’d be
awake,” he said. “You’re normally the first up.”
“You’re right. Why… oh – Jack, don’t be so ridiculous.
You’re going to be seeing me like this a lot more.”
Jack shook his head, still not looking at her. “I
can’t,” he said quietly. “You deserve a young man, someone around the age you
look.”
Jack turned as he felt Rose’s hand on his cheek. “I
want you,” she told him gently, but firmly. She stood on tiptoes and kissed him
gently before resuming dressing at top speed. There was a delicate blush on her
cheeks, and she looked slightly annoyed as her hear popped out of her
polo-neck.
“I didn’t think about sleep,” she berated herself. “I
should have remembered that I would need to sleep more now.”
“Let me guess,” Jack said, handing her a uniform
tunic. “You went to sleep at around three or four, same as normal?”
“Yes,” she growled, sitting down to pull on her socks
and boots. “There’s so much I’ll have to get used to.”
“Welcome to mortality,” Jack said teasingly, handing
her a hairbrush.
Indigo pulled the brush quickly through her short
hair, before discarding the brush on the bed and standing. She rubbed her eyes
to get rid of the sleep deposits and glanced in the mirror.
“It’ll have to do, I suppose,” she moaned.
“You look perfect,” Vermilion told her, pulling her
towards him and kissing her. He pulled away after only a few seconds and placed
her cap on her dark head.
“Now, we need to go, or we really won’t get there on
time.”
Rose and Jack met up with Major Scarlet just outside
the Conference Room. Dark stubble shadowed his cheeks and his vest wasn’t yet
done up, and he was, like them, a minute late.
“Look at you, you’re a mess!” she scolded
affectionately, reaching to fasten the zipper on his vest, allowing him time to
straighten his cap, which was currently at a very precarious angle. “Did you
oversleep, by any chance?”
“You too, eh?” he replied with a smile, before
stifling a yawn and rubbing at the bristles on his chin.
“Shall we go and bite the bullet, Colonel Svenson?” Scarlet said, opening the door and allowing the
American to pass ahead of him.
Major Indigo and Captain Vermilion were already seated
around the table, along with Doctor Verdant and General Claret, sitting in the
centre, as the three older officers entered. The general gave them a very stern
look that reminded Scarlet sharply of Colonel White. Despite the fact that
Claret was a petite, purple woman, she possessed that same authoritative
persona that brought grown men to heel with ease.
Swiftly, Scarlet came to attention, an action mirrored
by the two temporally displaced officers at his side.
“Please accept our apologies for our tardiness,” Jack
began when it was clear that he had drawn the short straw by holding the higher
rank. “Majors Scarlet and Metcalfe have experienced some difficulties in
adjusting to their new circumstances.”
Claret’s keen eyes studied the errant trio carefully
before questioning the use of name. “Major Metcalfe?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Vermilion continued. “The major and I
have decided to adopt our given names for the time being, to avoid confusion
between us and our younger counterparts.”
“I see,” Claret mused. “Well, sit down, Colonel,
Majors. We’re already late.”
Meekly, Jack, Rose and Scarlet took vacant seats
around the perimeter of the table.
Claret fixed each officer in turn with a stern glare
as her chair rotated slowly in the centre of the circular table.
“I have called this meeting in order to clarify the
events of yesterday,” she said authoritatively. “I, for one, am not quite sure
I understand what occurred, nor what would cause two senior Spectrum officers
to break the most important of the Temporal Orders so seriously. I trust that
there was a good reason, Colonel Svenson?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack replied briskly. “Without going
into too much detail, without Major Metcalfe’s intervention, a chain of events
would be set up that would lead to the eventual extinction of life on Earth.”
Claret looked deeply unimpressed. “You’ll excuse me if
I need a little more convincing, Colonel. Whilst you are here, you are subject
to my command, no matter who might be the head of Spectrum in your time.”
“It’s still you, ma’am,” Jack said. “However, the
actual events that were to happen are not important. As long as they do not
occur, then we are justified in our actions.”
‘Rosie, what did I do to make you come back and change
me?’
The projected thought caught Rose off guard. She
hadn’t tested her telepathy since she had lost her retrometabolism, had thought
that it would have been lost along with her indestructibility. Obviously,
however, she had been wrong. If Scarlet could still project, then the odds were
that she could too.
She steadfastly looked at Claret. ‘What makes you
think that it was anything you did?’ she projected back, ensuring that the
thought was shielded from Claret.
‘There must have been something.’ The extra shielding hadn’t taken into account the
other telepath in the conference room. Claret and Jack were still politely
arguing, heedless of the fact that the three Metcalfes
were engaged in a telepathic conversation of their own.
‘I wouldn’t have altered causality without a damn good
reason,’ the younger Indigo
continued.
Rose shifted uncomfortably in her seat and stared at
her hands, which were clasped on the tabletop. ‘I’d
rather not say,’ she thought to them.
Both Scarlet and her younger self pressed the
question, and under their joint scrutiny, Rose relented. She doubted that she
would have held up if Indigo really tried to get an answer from her.
‘You committed suicide on Christmas Eve,’ she told Scarlet, still not meeting his gaze. ‘Your
death precipitated a civil war on Mars, which then led to the start of the
second War of Nerves.’
The whole room fell silent. Scarlet and Indigo were staring at Rose, who had her head bowed and her
eyes closed, looking very small and delicate next to Jack. Claret had stopped
speaking and looked very unimpressed at the three Metcalfes.
Following Claret’s lead, Jack had also stopped speaking.
“When you three have quite finished,” Claret said
icily, “I couldn’t quite catch what you were saying, and I am certain that
Captain Vermilion and Colonel Svenson didn’t, either.
You all know the rules regarding conversation in staff meetings: no telepathy.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rose said, her voice thick with emotion.
Yesterday, she had been able to shut off her memories, seeing her father alive
again had made everything that had occurred seem so very distant, but now it
was catching up to her. That awful night seemed like only yesterday, the pain
still fresh and raw.
Claret could not fail to notice. “I think we need to know,”
she said, more gently.
“I know why you were keeping your silence, Rose,”
Scarlet said, sounding shaken but assertive. “I don’t mind if you tell General
Claret and Captain Vermilion.”
“I… I can’t believe it,” Indigo said quietly. “I don’t
believe that you would ever do something like that, Dad.”
“I can,” Scarlet admitted in a hoarse voice.
Rose looked up and met Scarlet’s eyes. Her eyes were
brimming with tears, but he could also see comprehension there. She understood
now what had led to the events of Christmas Eve, what had driven his
counterpart to take his own life.
“Perhaps I should begin?” Scarlet offered. “I know the
beginning of the story.”
“Thank you,” Rose said softly.
“As you may have realised, I haven’t been myself
recently,” Scarlet began, sounding slightly ashamed of his melancholy. “I have
never been comfortable with the idea of immortality, and with my three
hundredth birthday approaching, all I could think of was the fact that I wanted
to be able to see an end to my life. Five days ago, I asked Rose to reverse the
effects of my Mysteronisation and shut down my
retrometabolism.”
“That was why I left Starbase,”
Indigo interrupted softly. “I had to get out of here.”
Claret nodded her understanding.
“I wish I hadn’t done that,” Rose said. “I just needed
some time away to sort my thoughts out.”
“It didn’t help,” Indigo admitted. “I just felt more
hurt and confused than ever.”
Rose nodded. “The fact that it was bloody freezing
didn’t help,” she said with a small smile.
“This is weird,” Indigo said. “I know you’re me, but…”
Rose grinned. “Yeah, I know.”
“Ladies?”
“Sorry, General,” the two
Indigos said in unison.
“I did a lot of soul-searching, trying to put my fears
at rest, but when Dad came to me yesterday, I couldn’t go through with it. I’ve
never known how I stop the retrometabolism when I free Mysteron agents, and
I’ve never been able to do that in replicants over a month or so old. The few
times I’ve tried, I came out of it so weak, without actually achieving
anything.”
“Over the next week, Paul got progressively more and
more withdrawn.” Jack took over the story from Indigo. “Depressed, wouldn’t
speak to anyone, spending all his off duty time locked up in his quarters.”
“On Christmas Eve, Jack and I had drawn the night
watch together,” Rose said, her eyes unfocussed as she
remembered. “Just before midnight, I sensed what Dad was about to do. He was in
the core, standing next to the generator. I got there just in time to see…” She
broke off, unable to form the words.
“The worst of it was,” Jack picked up the tale again
after a moment of shocked silence, “we had only just been talking about the
reversal, and Rose had decided that she was going to do it after all, for
Christmas instead of Paul’s birthday.”
“We buried you in Winchester, next to Grandma and
Granddad,” Rose continued, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. “Everything
was arranged very quickly; we had a private funeral on the twenty-seventh, with
a memorial planned for the New Year.
“On New Year’s Eve, I was on Mars with the First
Minister when the government was overrun by the war supporters, seeing
opportunity now that one of their biggest problems was out of the way and the
other was… distracted. They started a very vicious civil war. Mysterons can do
a whole host of very nasty things to each other when they want to, and it
wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for me, either. By New Year’s Day, most of
the ruling body was dead, and the peace supporters folded. I barely managed to
escape with my life. Lieutenant Opal distracted the new leaders of the group
mind whilst I fired up the engines of the Angel I’d borrowed for the trip –
legitimately, this time. Opal came back to Earth with me, just in time for us
to hear the Voice of the Mysterons declaring war again.” Rose shuddered at the
memory.
“The war has been going on ever since then,” Jack
said. “The Mysterons are managing to complete their threats more often than
not. There is no way we’re going to win this time.”
“Opal and I saw the end, using that precognition sense
– what would happen if we didn’t manage to stop the war,” Rose added,
sounding much stronger now, secure in her conviction that what she had done was
right. “Within a month, the Mysterons were going to set off a nuclear bomb, big
enough to irradiate the whole Earth. Those who weren’t lucky enough to be
killed in the initial explosion would have been living on a dead world – crops
would have failed, food stocks rapidly diminish, people fighting each other to
feed their families. But even if they managed to feed themselves, they would
have died of radiation sickness within a year. By New Year, 2374, the Earth
will be nothing but a ball of dirt, with dead plants and animals lying
everywhere, with no bacteria left to rot them.
“The only way to stop it happening was to prevent the
war from starting in the first place; by stopping you from dying, Dad.” Rose
smiled faintly. “After that vision, causality didn’t seem to matter that much.”
There was silence. Then: “You never told me that,”
Jack said weakly. “Never said how it would happen.”
“I can see why,” Vermilion said dryly. “It’s not a
pretty picture second-hand.”
“No, it’s not,” Claret agreed, licking her lips
nervously. “Are you certain that it has been averted? Couldn’t the fact that
Major Scarlet is no longer indestructible still cause the uprising on Mars?”
“We considered it,” Rose said. “One of the factors in
the uprising was the fact that Dad had committed suicide. Opal and I, along
with a few other Mysteron refugees, think that even the violent factions will
respect the fact that Dad has renounced what they still see as a ‘gift’, in
order to live a peaceful life. They don’t understand that the human mind is not
designed to cope with living for hundreds of years, so they couldn’t understand
why he did what he did – they just saw it as more violence.”
Indigo had her eyes closed. Her older counterpart knew
that she was searching for an answer beyond the senses of her peers, seeing
things that the human mind was not meant to see; exhibiting a difference that
most people could not accept about her.
“I can’t see the civil war,” she said eventually, with
a smile. “The peace will continue. Nothing that you described will happen.”
Everyone knew better than to ask how she knew. It was
just one of those things that they had to put down to bizarre Mysteron
abilities. The clairvoyance was one of the spookier powers, though, and Indigo
tended to keep very quiet about anything she managed to perceive through it,
unless it was important. She knew it unnerved her friends, and for her, it
brought a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘déjà vu’. She didn’t like
using that particular aspect of her powers – she preferred to find things out
when they happened, and not before.
“Well, thank God for that,” Rose said, laughing
softly. “I’d have been really annoyed if we’d done all this for nothing.”
Claret sighed and turned to Dr.
Verdant, who had remained silent throughout the relating of the events leading
up to Rose and Jack returning to this time.
“Doctor, I know you have spoken to Major Scarlet and
Major Metcalfe already, but I would be grateful if you could brief the rest of
us on the practical aspects of their altered condition.”
Verdant stood up and glanced at both officers for a
final confirmation of their consent before beginning.
“Well, General, as you know, Major Metcalfe’s actions
yesterday disabled the retrometabolic process in both
her and Major Scarlet. Whether this is a permanent state of affairs or not
remains to be seen, considering that
Major Indigo has already regained her retrometabolism before - after it
apparently stopped in 2089.”
Both versions of Vermilion stared at their respective
Indigos, and even Claret seemed taken aback by the remark.
“I was electrocuted,” the Indigos explained simultaneously,
then flashed matching mischievous grins at each other.
“This feels different,” Rose said to the doctor. “This
feels permanent. Then again, I thought it would be permanent then, too.”
“Only time will tell,” Verdant said, trying to get
back on track. “For the time being, both Major Scarlet and Major Metcalfe seem
to be almost completely normal Humans. Their immune systems seem to be coping
with the change well, although I’m scheduling several shots to ensure that they
both remain healthy. I have already sent a list to Doctor Chartreuse, so there
is absolutely no chance of you getting out of it, Major Metcalfe.”
“Damn,” Rose swore playfully. Verdant was reminding
her forcibly of Doctor Fawn, in anticipating her trying to avoid Sickbay for as
long as they were on Starbase.
“Both of you are physically fit,” Verdant continued,
“and as far as I can tell, Majors, you will both age normally now. Again,
though, only time will tell whether this is actually the case. Of course, there
are certain limitations now that you are not indestructible, sleep being one of
these. You must remember that you need more sleep now, not just a couple of
hours a night. Naturally, there will be a period of adjustment whilst you get
used to a new routine, but I can see no reason not to release you both onto
active duty. Only,” Verdant added, with a twinkle in his eye, “no stepping in
front of bullets.”
“Well, I can’t promise that,” Scarlet said.
“Me neither,” Rose added.
Claret sighed in dismay at the irrepressible pair.
“There is one matter that we need to discuss,
General,” Rose said more seriously as Verdant sat back down.
“What is that?”
“Unless we keep the chain going, we’ll have a paradox
– a true paradox – on our hands. I – Indigo, I mean – will have to go to go
back in time thirty-six years from now and do what I’ve done, and explain this
over – to keep the timeline going, so that Dad is always alive, and the events
that lead to what created my timeline can’t happen again.”
“I know,” Indigo said quietly. “I can do it.”
“I don’t think I can really refuse, can I?” Claret
said with a sigh. “Knowing what will happen without your intervention, I can
condone the breach of regulations. Now, are there any more issues to discuss?”
At the negative responses around the table, Claret called
an end to the meeting. Doctor Verdant caught Major Metcalfe before she left and
they headed out together, with Rose waving a dismissive hand at Colonel Svenson, which amused Claret greatly.
He’s still crazy about her, even after all that time, she thought as she left the centre of the table and
walked around the perimeter.
Major Indigo and Captain Vermilion were ahead of the
others, talking in low voices, and they missed the exchange. Major Scarlet,
however, saw.
‘When will they work it out?’ Claret asked with a tolerant smile, watching Jack
walk forlornly back to the Endeavour.
‘Yesterday’,
Scarlet replied, perching on the edge of the next to where Claret was standing.
‘Yesterday?’
she reflected back at him.
Scarlet nodded. ‘In Sickbay, just before you
arrived with our versions of them. I was beginning to lose hope.’ They
lapsed into silence, contemplating what had been revealed during the briefing.
“Paul, were you really that unhappy?” Claret’s voice
was tinged with sadness.
Scarlet stopped slouching on the table and stood
before her, his head bowed. “Yes, I was,” he admitted in a low voice. “I
thought about going down to the generator last night and doing exactly what…
what I did do in their alternate timeline.”
Claret took his hands in hers. “I knew something was
wrong, but I never thought for a moment that it was that bad.”
Scarlet raised his gaze slightly, from the floor to
the hands that were holding his. “I
tried to hide it, for Rose’s sake, but I just didn’t want to go on living like
that, with no end in sight. Now though… Now I know that I will die, one day;
that I’m not going to live forever…” He smiled shyly at her. “I think I can
live with that.”
*****
“Now, don’t forget that you have to come back and do
this yourself in thirty-six years’ time,” Rose reminded her counterpart as they
stood at the airlock linking Starbase to the Endeavour,
five days later. “Otherwise, the chain will be broken and we’ll have a true
paradox. Plus, I won’t have a job to go back to.”
“I won’t,” Indigo laughed. “Are you sure you won’t
stay a bit longer?”
“I’m sure,” her future self replied.
“We need to be getting back to our time. Look after Dad for me, will you? I
want to see him there when I get back.”
“No problem,” Indigo assured her. “Make sure you look
after yourself. Remember that you’re not indestructible any
more.”
“I know.” Without a further word, the older Indigo
turned and stepped through the airlock.
Vermilion approached Indigo as the airlock cycled shut
behind her, closing the ship off from Starbase.
“How do you feel?” he asked her, noting the thoughtful
expression on her face.
She gazed up at him, making no attempt to hide the
affection in her blue eyes. “Good,” she replied. “Everything’s worked out
well.”
“Better that I hoped,” Vermilion commented, taking the
tiny woman in his arms tenderly. “I just wish I’d had the courage to do this forty years ago.”
“Forty years ago, I’d have run a mile,” she responded
sorrowfully. “I’ve always been afraid of getting too close.”
“And now?” Vermilion asked playfully.
“Well, I’ve changed since then,” she replied, equally
playfully as he bent to kiss her.
“How long is it to that black hole?” Vermilion asked
when they broke apart.
“Twelve hours,” Indigo replied. “We’re travelling
directly this time, instead of avoiding the traffic.”
“That still leaves us plenty of time,” Vermilion said
cryptically. “Cerulean,” he continued into his comm., “set a course back to the
black hole at cruising speed, and take us out.”
“SIG,” the scientist replied.
There was a slight tremor beneath their feet as the starship’s engines eased them away from Starbase.
Vermilion extended his arm courteously to Indigo.
“Would you care to join me in my quarters for a meal, Major?” he asked, all innocence.
“Why, yes, Colonel,” she replied, taking his arm.
“That sounds delightful.”
Vermilion was rudely awoken by Lieutenant Periwinkle’s
voice sounding over the comm. Rousing from a dream, he
was slightly disorientated for a moment, until the sound of gentle breathing
and the warmth of another body in his bed reminded him pleasantly of the past
few hours.
Careful not to wake Indigo, he slid from the bed and
pulled on a robe before answering the screen on his desk.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” he said.
“I’m sorry to have woken you, sir,” Periwinkle said apologetically, her lavender eyes
taking his rumpled appearance. “We have arrived at the singularity.”
A noise across the room distracted Vermilion for a
moment before he answered. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, Lieutenant. Keep
us at a safe distance from the event horizon until then.”
“SIG,”
Periwinkle replied as the screen winked off.
Vermilion stood up and walked back towards the bed.
Indigo was already up, and the light from the stars in his window backlit her
slender figure perfectly.
“Did you hear?” he asked her as she picked their
uniforms up from the floor.
“Yes,” she replied. “Nearly home.”
“Do you want to take a shower first?” Vermilion asked
her.
“You mean I have to go alone?” she shot back
playfully, heading towards the bathroom door and grabbing his hand on the way.
“It’ll be much more fun together.”
Exactly fourteen and a half minutes after speaking
with Periwinkle, Colonel Vermilion and Major Indigo arrived on the bridge. It
was the middle of ship’s night, and consequently, there were only three
officers on the bridge. Periwinkle was in command as the senior lieutenant, as
well as performing the science officer’s duties, and she was accompanied by
Lieutenant Sable of Engineering and Cadet Cinnabar at the helm. Vermilion felt
rather outnumbered; in an organisation that still primarily human, despite the
fact that their General was not, he was used to seeing at least two Humans in a
bridge crew at any time, and suddenly found that he was the only full human
present amongst this all-Centauran shift.
Consequently, the bridge was very quiet when he and Indigo entered. He
exchanged a glance with her, and could see that she too was amused, although
not surprised. The silence didn’t seem to bother her much, either, although it
unnerved him.
“Can you still hear them?” he whispered, not wanting
to disturb the three officers whilst he and Indigo remained unseen from the
three occupied stations.
“Yes,” Indigo whispered back. “I’ve not lost
everything, you know. It’s just a normal conversation, though – nothing
exciting. Oh, but that is…”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing,” Indigo said with a little wave of her
hand. “Girl stuff.”
Vermilion decided to make his presence known, and
strode purposefully towards his vacant chair. Indigo followed close behind and
took the seat to Vermilion’s right. It was, technically, hers, as the First
Officer, but as she had been acting as helmsman for a majority of the mission
because of her unique abilities, she had not yet had the chance to test it out.
It was quite satisfactory, she determined after an experimental shuffle around,
comfortable, yet not so soft that she would want to fall asleep in it. Just right for a peacetime military ship.
“Lieutenant Periwinkle, report please,” Vermilion
asked the scientist.
“We arrived at the vicinity of the singularity fifteen
minutes ago, sir,” Periwinkle responded at once. “The ship is at full stop,
awaiting the execution of the slingshot manoeuvre to return us to our proper
time. The singularity does not show any signs of dangerous fluctuation, and
Lieutenant Sable advises that the SIF is at full power. There should be no
problems for the temporal journey.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Vermilion said. Before he
could give any orders, Indigo stood, almost in unison with Cadet Cinnabar, and
they traded positions, Indigo sliding easily into the helmsman’s seat whilst
Cinnabar stood off to one side. As they passed each other, Vermilion was amused
by the fact that Indigo, who was small for a human,
was a full head taller than the Centauran female.
“Come and sit down, Cadet,” he invited her, indicating
to Indigo’s vacated chair. “You don’t want to miss the show.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” Cinnabar said graciously,
crossing the bridge and hopping up onto the seat. Her legs didn’t reach the
ground when she sat back, but the minor inconvenience did not seem to bother
her that much. Vermilion was reminded that she was still an adolescent,
although already over thirty Earth years old. She would not reach full height
for another year or so, round about the same time as her shock of white hair
darkened.
“Ready to implement slingshot,” Indigo stated, bringing Vermilion’s
thoughts back to the present.
“Very well, Major. Execute.”
Vermilion still had some reservations about this return trip, but Indigo had
spent the last week convincing him that going forward was much easier than
going back, and she didn’t need the enhanced senses that Opal had given her to
perform the return trip. What worried him was that she wouldn’t say whether or
not she still had any kind of temporal sense now that she had lost her
retrometabolism.
Too late now,
he told himself as her nimble fingers danced over the helm, taking them into a
fast, low orbit around the black hole. He was sincerely glad that the Centaurans could not hear his thoughts as they could each
other’s. No sense in worrying them over this.
Colours swirled around the ship as they picked up
speed courtesy of the singularity, faster than the engines of the ship could
propel them. Breaking the temporal barrier seemed to go far more smoothly on
this occasion than the last. Only the slight shudder of the inertial dampeners
gave any indication that anything unusual had occurred; there was none of the
distortion that had disorientated him on the last trip.
“Did we make it?” he asked as the Endeavour
came to a stop a few light hours from the singularity.
“Planetary alignment seems to indicate that we have
arrived at a similar time to the one we left,” Periwinkle said, studying her
instruments.
“Indigo?”
“December 2372, definitely,” she replied, sounding a
lot less certain than she had when giving the date and time on the previous
trip. “Sixteenth or seventeenth, I think.”
“‘You think’?” Vermilion teased. “Not very precise, is
it?”
“Sorry, Colonel,” she said, not sounding in the least
bit apologetic.
“December sixteenth,” Periwinkle supplied.
“Twenty-hundred fourteen hours.”
“In that case, set course for Earth,” Vermilion said.
“Best possible speed. We don’t want to be late.”
“Aye, sir,” Indigo acknowledged,
sounding grateful. “ETA Starbase, oh-two hundred hours at top speed.”
*****
There was a small reception committee gathered at the
airlock when it was finally opened. Vermilion and Indigo stepped out onto Starbase to be greeted by a very familiar face, although it
was older than either of them remembered. Once jet-black hair had become
distinguished silver, and laughter lines now creased the corners of bright blue
eyes. Indigo stopped, almost disbelieving despite the events of the past week.
Tears of joy welled up in her eyes as she ran forward, into her father’s arms.
“Hush, my little Angel,” Scarlet said softly, stroking
her hair as he had when she was a child, whilst she sobbed into his chest.
“Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Mince pie, anyone?”
There were groans from around the table.
“I couldn’t eat another bite,” Vermilion said,
massaging his stomach. “I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much before!”
“I used to be able to eat that much,” Indigo
complained half-heartedly. “I guess that I still have a lot to learn about my
limits.”
“You’ll adapt,” General Scarlet told her. “I remember
that it took me a while to find certain things out, too. Like
not being able to gorge myself on delicious food, for example. I think
that retrometabolism was a blessing when it came to Christmas.”
“It certainly was,” Indigo concurred. “How the hell
are you still hungry?”
Former-General Claret was peeling the foil case from a
mince pie, having given up on her three human companions. “Different digestive
system,” she said. “Also, this is the first time I’ve ever had Christmas
dinner. I want to sample everything.”
“You certainly did a good job making it,” Indigo
complimented her. “Just like I remember.”
“I wasn’t sure everything would come out right,”
Claret confessed. “It’s my first attempt at anything like this.”
“It was fantastic, Lanna,”
Scarlet said, giving his wife a peck on the cheek. “You’ve done yourself
proud.”
“You would say that even if I’d burned everything,”
she pointed out.
“True,” Scarlet conceded, after pretending to give the
matter some thought. “But you’d know that I was lying.”
“I have
something that I need to say,” Vermilion announced abruptly, setting down his
wine glass and turning to Indigo.
“Rose, the past two weeks have been the happiest of my
life. I’ve wasted so much time ignoring how I feel about you, time that I
should have spent persuading you that I never cared that you were different,
that we could make a go of it. I don’t want to waste a
moment more.” He slid off his chair and knelt beside her. “Will you marry me?”
From his pocket he produced a small box, which he
opened to display the ring nestled inside.
Indigo’s eyes sparkled as she looked at the ring,
recognising it instantly. “Why, you old romantic!” she exclaimed delightedly.
“Of course I’ll marry you.”
Vermilion extracted the ring from its case and slid it
gently onto Indigo’s slender finger. The diamonds surrounding the central ruby
shone brightly, catching the light of the candles burning low on the table. He
stood, and she stood with him, gazing up into his eyes. He bent to kiss her
tenderly, although he was mindful of their audience on this occasion, and
reluctantly parted from his new fiancée after a few moments.
“This calls for champagne,” Scarlet declared,
disappearing into the tiny kitchen for a moment, reappearing with a champagne
bottle and four flutes.
“I hope that’s non-alcoholic,” Claret said
half-heartedly, knowing her husband too well to expect him to pay attention to
the rules regarding alcohol. She had let the wine slide, but this was going a
little too far, even though she understood that it was a human custom.
“Of course it’s not,” Scarlet replied, scandalised, as
he unwound the wire covering the cork. “I’m not breaking with long-established
tradition. You know as well as I do that we never use non-alcoholic
champagne in Spectrum. There was an… incident the one
and only time it was done.” The cork popped out of the bottle, and Indigo
smiled as she recalled the old story she had been told so often.
“You two have planned this,” she accused the two men.
“The bottle of champagne that you just happened to have handy, this ring… Where
did you find it? I thought it was lost for good!”
“It was in the house at Winchester,” Scarlet told her,
handing her a flute, filled almost to the brim with fizzing champagne. “Behind one of the picture frames on the mantle in the lounge.
I found it years ago and put it away for safekeeping. You were off world, on
assignment, and I forgot about it when you got back. When Jack asked me for
your hand, just before you left Starbase all those
years ago, I asked him whether he would like to give you your
mother’s engagement ring.”
“I wasn’t sure at first,” Vermilion continued, picking
up the story. “But then I remembered how upset you’d been when you lost it, and
I knew you’d be pleased to know it was safe.”
“And you hung on to it all these years?” Indigo asked
her father. “You’re more romantic than you let on.”
“Oh, he’s certainly that,” Claret remarked. “When he
proposed to me, we were on shore leave together. It was the first time I’d been
to the family house, and we walked through the woods to the lake. He had a
picnic of all my favourite foods, all of them fresh from Centaura,
and when he asked me, he spoke in Centauran,
absolutely word-perfect.”
Indigo let out a low whistle. “That’s not easy,” she
said. “Took me years to learn Centauran, and I’m a
linguist. The pronunciation is very difficult for us Humans, and that…” She
frowned for a moment, trying the phrase out in her mind. “That’s a real
tongue-twister.”
“That’s what you said when I asked you to teach me,
too,” Scarlet said with a smile. “The other you, that
is. It was worth the struggle, though.”
“The ‘other me’,” Indigo repeated thoughtfully. “I
still haven’t quite gotten used to that.”
“Neither have I,” Scarlet concurred. “I have to keep
reminding myself that you didn’t have the same life as she did. You and Jack
lived through thirty-six years of hell instead.”
“I still have problems remembering that none of that
ever happened now,” Vermilion agreed. “I always hated stories about paradoxes
when I was a kid, and now half my life has been swallowed up in one. Not that
I’m complaining – it’s great that none of it has happened.”
“Bit weird, finding photos of ourselves, together,”
Indigo added. “I know things happened differently, but it’s a real reminder of
how different this place is to the one we left.”
Vermilion nodded and took a sip of wine before
speaking. “Is it normal, now?” he asked thoughtfully. “Mixed-species
marriages? I don’t think I ever heard of one before.”
“No,” Claret said emphatically.
“It’s not common,” Scarlet added. “Lanna
was the first Centauran to marry outside her species,
and I… Well, I don’t have much of an option, do I? It never stopped me before.”
His words could have been serious, if not for the wide grin on Scarlet’s face.
“There are a few mixed couples now, mostly within Spectrum. I think we proved
that it could be done, and others weren’t afraid to follow once there was
precedent.”
“And your proposal was so lovely,” Claret said. “And
before that, I thought that I was too old and too sensible to be swept off my
feet.”
“Never,” Scarlet said smoothly. “You’re still in the
prime of your life. Wait until you get to my age before you start saying things
like that.”
Claret and Indigo exchanged knowing, tolerant glances.
Now that she was getting over her wild elation at simply being able to see him
whenever she wanted, Indigo was starting to realise that he was much happier
than he had been for many years before she had changed him. The prospect of
eternal life no longer hung over him, and he seemed much more alive now than he
had been for the last hundred years. There was just one thing left to complete
the dream that he had told her about all those long years ago.
“Actually, I’ve got an announcement of my own,” she
said with a shy smile. “As I’m sure you remember, Dad, Verdant and Chartreuse
kept us under close scrutiny for the week following our change, and Chartreuse
has kept it up since we arrived in this time.”
“Yes, Verdant did the same with me,” Scarlet confirmed
as he handed a second flute of champagne to Vermilion. “It took him about a
year before he gave up on the weekly physicals.”
Indigo nodded. “Well, Chartreuse discovered something
during one of those exams before we left. I didn’t want to say anything just
then, and it’s still very early days, but I’m expecting a baby next
September.”
“A… baby?” Vermilion stammered. “You’re pregnant? That’s…”
Vermilion’s expression changed in a moment from one of shock to utter delight.
“That’s brilliant!”
“A double celebration then,” Scarlet declared with a
wide smile. Quickly, he found a spare champagne flute, filled it with lemonade
and gave it to his daughter. Indigo gratefully traded it for her champagne.
“A toast,” Scarlet said, raising his glass. “To the future.”
The
four glasses met at the centre of the table, with Vermilion and Indigo echoing
the toast. In unspoken agreement, they linked arms and drank.
Well, what can I
say? I’m not really sure what the original inspiration was for this story, but
I know that I started writing it just after the first announcement of the
Multiverse Challenge back in 2003. It’s been sitting in the back of my mind
since then, until I began typing it up last month. I realised then that most of
the action takes place in the week leading up to Christmas, so why not enter it
in the Christmas Challenge as well?
There are some
references to other stories that I have written or am writing at the moment.
There is one reference to my first fan-fic, ‘Pride and Joy’, along with several veiled hints at
the rest of the story arc. I’ve tried to be as vague as possible with those so
that I don’t spoil the surprise (which is, coincidently, the name of the next
story in the series) that is coming… I think that the identity Indigo’ s first love is obvious from P&J (and ‘The Gift’, which isn’t part of the series), and
Scarlet’s second wife is…
What, did you
really think I was going to be that nice to you?
Thanks as always to
Chris Bishop, who has encouraged me to write for the last five years, through
my ups and downs and through my multiple exam periods. She has been my rock,
and deserves all the praise she receives. Please keep up the sterling work,
Chris!
Thanks also to
Marion Woods, my long-suffering beta-reader, for the expert use of a fine-tooth
comb, and for her words of wisdom. Any errors or omissions are my own.
I do not own the
character of Captain Scarlet, nor any of the original characters I may have
mentioned from time to time. They are the invention of Gerry and Sylvia
Anderson, and belong to Granada Ventures at the moment. Scarlet’s parents are
the invention of Mary J. Rudy, as is the engagement ring that Vermilion gives
to Indigo, and are used with kind permission.
All of the other
characters (Indigo, Vermilion, Claret etc.) are my
own, as are the three alien species that I mention. Any resemblances that may
occur are unintentional.
It took me quite a
while to notice that my two main characters bear the same names as the two
companions from Doctor Who 2005, probably because I named my Jack nearly three
years ago, and Rose has been around for nearly five years now. I suppose I’ll
just have to put it down to one of life’s little coincidences.
The character of
Jack has evolved quite a long way in the last month or so – including acquiring
a surname. I never planned for him to be a descendent of Blue and Symphony. He
originally had dark hair and eyes (a bit like his namesake –Jack O’Neill from Stargate SG-1, who is rather dishy, for an older man), and
he and Rose were not supposed to become a couple. Funny how
things just seem to come out like that when you’re stuck on a long train
journey with a laptop and a plug socket (thank you, GNER).
I hope you’ve
enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Have a prosperous
2006.
Lezli
22 December 2005
& 6 January 2006
Any comments? Email the author – fanfic@supermarionationforever.co.uk