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.