Free The Mandate of Heaven by Mike Smith Page A

to the cavern apart from the small corridor that we had just entered by.
    So how had the ship got here, and just where had it gone?
    I would find out the next day when my father explained just what Professor Henry Alcubierre had invented, but that explanation had to wait, as I had already fainted dead away.
    I, of course, blamed it on my lack of sleep the night before.
    *****
    “A fusion reactor?  That’s impossible,” I vehemently disagreed.
    “You use that term so confidently,” my father sighed.  “Who are you to say what is possible and what is not?”
    “I’ve seen a fusion reactor.  It’s hard to miss, what with it being a few hundred feet tall and all.”
    My father and I had been having this same argument for the last few hours, ever since he had first explained to me how the ship worked.  While he wasn’t an engineer and didn’t know all the details, he had worked closely with the Professor for several months.  The basic principal was similar to the Alcubierre FTL drive. The Celeste was fitted with one, but instead of being surrounded by a negative-energy field, it moved into one of the other thirteen dimensions of super-string theory. This was identical to our own, but where time flowed at a different pace, moving the ship slightly out of phase, that infinitesimal tick between the second hand of a clock.  From the perspective of a person observing the ship from this reality—it simply vanished.
    “The shielding alone to contain the reaction would be hundreds of feet thick, and that doesn’t even include the cooling systems required for the superconductors to maintain the integrity of the magnetic containment shell.”
    “So what you’re saying is that you cannot build a self-contained fusion reactor, less than a hundred feet in diameter, correct?” my father asked.
    “Absolutely.”
    “I see,” my father smirked.  In the blink of an eye he smoothly drew the fusion pistol, which I hadn’t even noticed him carrying, the beam surging forward and striking a tree, several metres distant, dead centre.
    “Then I guess that’s also impossible, as it’s powered by an even smaller, micro-fusion reactor,” my father grinned.
    Leaving me standing in the middle of our lawn, mouth agape, staring at the perfectly round hole, over an inch in diameter, cut cleanly all the way through the ancient tree trunk.
    *****
    “So who is she?” I prompted my father one evening, a few days later.  I had requested permission to look around the Celeste , which my father had agreed to, in that maddeningly dismissive way of his, pointing out that the ship belonged to me now, just as much as him.  The indifferent attitude, a father agreeing for his child to go ahead and play with his newest toy, had put me in a foul mood for most of the day.  The fact that I made little progress trying to glean the inner workings of the ship, even after twelve hours tinkering away, had hardly helped matters.  Looking back on that day, I wonder perhaps if that was why I pushed him just as far as I did.
    “Nobody to concern yourself with,” my father said, ignoring me completely and continuing to scribble into his journal.
    “Oh, come on,” I cried out loud.  “It’s not as if you don’t know about all my conquests.”
    “You’re not still sore about Elizabeth refusing to kiss you in tenth grade are you?” he looked up at me with a raised eyebrow, “as you really need to get over that.”
    Grinding my teeth together in frustration, wondering if he would ever forget that incident, I snapped back irritably.  “It’s just that you know everything about me and I know so little about you.  It’s only by accident that I found out that you knew Professor Alcubierre and that you’ve got his damn spaceship secreted in our basement!”
    My father cast me a stern glance at the use of my profanity, but obviously decided to let it slip, just this once, as he must have observed something in my expression.  Instead he turned