The Complete New Dominion Trilogy

by Drury, Matthew J.

  Exasperated, Paramo went and slumped into one of the metal chairs by his bed, feeling his knees turn weak and watery. His throat shrivelled, and he opened and closed his mouth several times, completely at a loss for what to say. “This is not good,” he said finally. “How could we have been so stupid? I knew they would find a way to get through our defences. I just knew it.”

  Lorelei Chen glanced at the ceiling. “Paramo, we have to do something about this, and soon…”

  He seemed startled. “And what, exactly, do you propose that we do, Lorelei?”

  She continued breathlessly. “We must smash those cowards now with everything that we have! We gather all our military might for a strike on their base of operations before it’s too late.”

  Paramo fixed Chen with a withering glare. “You seem to be forgetting, Lora, that we still have no idea where they are coming from. Without knowing the enemy, if we act in haste we will be giving them the advantage, and that is a mistake we cannot afford to make, especially now.”

  She grimaced. “Xam Bahr will have all five of the artefact pieces by now.”

  “I know. We’ll need to…”

  A sudden blast of sound cut him off - that insidious and familiar musical piping over a singularly wide range, droning from somewhere out of sight. The sound was measured and definite, akin to a flute or a sambuke, growing in intensity. Distracted, Paramo went silent.

  Chen’s eyes widened with terror. “What… What is that?”

  Paramo got to his feet slowly, glancing at her. “You hear it too? I thought I was the only one…”

  “Yes…” She nodded, her senses on high alert now. “Something’s not right here.” The sound began to drone, rattle and beat - and Lorelei Chen felt an element of terror beyond anything she had ever known - her mind trying to fathom what must lie beyond these hideous cacophonies. The sounds increased in volume, and it felt almost as if they were approaching. “What’s going on?” she muttered. She tensed, as if expecting an explosion.

  Then, once again, the sound mutated and changed, forming guttural tones:

  “Paramo.”

  He licked his lips, glancing in all directions now. “It’s the voice I’ve been telling you about,” he whispered. Then, louder, “Who are you?”

  And now something strange was happening to the particles of dust in the room; some force seemed to be marshalling them, herding them away from a central point yet bringing others towards it, until they all met on the surface of a hollow sphere. That sphere, about a metre across, hovered in the air for a moment like a giant soap bubble. Then it elongated into an ellipsoid, whose surface began to pucker, to form folds and indentations. Paramo was not really surprised when it started to assume the dark shape of a man.

  He had seen such figures, blown out of glass, in museums and science exhibitions. But this dusty phantom did not even approximate anatomical accuracy; it was like a crude clay figurine, or one of the primitive works of art found in the recesses of Stone Age caves. Only the head was fashioned with care; and the face, beyond all shadow of doubt, was that of Cristian Stefánsson.

  “Paramo,” the voice spoke again. The lips of the figure never moved: the voice - yes, certainly Cris’ voice - was disembodied, and seemed to come from all around them.

  “Cris!” Chen breathed, unable to believe what she was seeing. Tears formed in her eyes instantly and poured down her cheeks. Overwhelmed, she dropped to her knees and wept, thick, blubbery whimpers.

  Paramo, seized by fear, managed to stay on his feet. “What are you?”

  “We are everything you are,” the ghostly figure replied. “We are the Dwellers of the Threshold.”

  “I don’t understand,” Paramo frowned.

  “We go into the lake without making a ripple; we go into the forest without disturbing a blade of grass.”

  Chen wiped away her tears. “Are you a ghost?”

  “If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, then the meal was cooked a long time ago.”

  “It’s speaking in riddles,” Paramo said. “At least, I think it is.” He leaned forward. “What is it that you want from me?”

  There was a pause, then: “You must follow the crimson stars. They will lead you to the Descended.”

  “Red stars? Follow them?” Paramo had no idea what the apparition was talking about. “Why? What are they?”

  But the ghostly figure was already fading, its grainy envelope beginning to dissolve back into the constituent particles of dust. As the image dissolved, Paramo stared, still petrified.

  The phantom vanished: only the motes of dancing dust were left, resuming their random patterns in the air. With an effort of will, Paramo came back to the present.

  “Well, Lorelei - what do you think of that?” he asked.

  Chen was still shaken and confused, and it was several seconds before she could reply. “The face and the voice were Cris’ - I’d swear to that. But what was it?”

  Paramo stood quietly, lost in his own thoughts. “I wish I knew.”

  It was late afternoon on Reria when Xam Bahr met with Yvanos Krin, though there was no way of really knowing for sure. The atmospheric disturbances caused by the extreme gravitational anomalies in this sector of space meant that the skies were filled with perpetual lightning storms, and the stars were rarely visible beyond the endless dark cloud cover. Day was impossible to distinguish from night here.

  Xam Bahr was not entirely happy with the idea of Sai’bot being involved in this conversation, but he supposed he had no choice. The damned Sirkharin, who had developed a bloated opinion of his own self-importance, was certain to ask annoying questions, and his impatience had already begun to make Bahr nervous, as though it were a contagion.

  Krin said, “Everything has been prepared in accordance with your instructions, Inquisitor.”

  “Nothing has been overlooked?” Xam Bahr asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then the five artefacts must be taken to that place now.”

  Krin glanced for a moment at Sai’bot. Then he turned and began to supervise a group of Genome Soldiers while they placed the container in a biotransport.

  Sai’bot, who had been silent, was annoyed. “What does he mean? What preparations are you talking about?”

  “It need not concern you, Sai’bot.”

  “Everything connected with the Xeilig Ark concerns me.”

  “I am going to piece together the five artefacts, exactly as we planned,” Xam Bahr said. “However, there are certain… certain preconditions, connected with the act.”

  “Preconditions? Such as?”

  “I don’t think you should worry, my friend. I don’t want to be the one responsible for overloading your already much-worked brain.”

  “You can spare me the sarcasm, Inquisitor. Sometimes it seems to me that you forget who saved you from the enemy after the Battle of Laputa, who brought you here to Reria in the first place.”

  Bahr stared at him for a time. “You must understand - it is not simply the piecing together of a group of trinkets, Sai’bot. These are potentially extremely dangerous objects. There is a certain amount of precaution involved, not to mention the religious ritual that must accompany this. We are not exactly dealing with a box of spare parts, you understand. This is not any ordinary undertaking.”

  Sai’bot nodded. “I suppose you are right, Inquisitor. Lord Damarus chose you as the Patriarch of His Holy Church for a reason.”

  “You will see in good time, Sai’bot. I just don’t want you to worry.” Bahr looked at the container which housed the five artefact pieces before staring at the huge, towering Cathedral beyond the docking area which had been purpose-built for this very moment - the place where the Xeilig Ark would be remade. More than ten years of preparation had led up to this.

  He experienced the same delicious sense of anticipation as he had many times before: it was hard, damnably hard, to take his eyes from the container. It lay in the back of a biotransport, magnetising him. Soon it will
be time, he thought.

  Soon the Master will rise again.

  Xam Bahr, Patriarch of the Holy Orthodoxy and Grand Inquisitor of the Empyreal Sun, stepped forward on the cold metallic decking. Remembering the words of the Book of Damarus from the Third Testament, he started to sing in a low, monotonous way. He chanted as he climbed the steps, hearing the sound of the five artefacts accompany his voice, the sound of humming. It was growing in intensity, rumbling, filling the darkness. The power of the artefacts, the intense power. It moved in Xam Bahr’s blood, bewildering, demanding to be understood.

  The power.

  He paused near the top of the steps, chanting still but unable to hear his own voice now. The humming, the humming - it was growing, slicing through the night, filling all the silences. Then he climbed more, reached the top, stared at the pieces as they floated together, suspended in a column of light. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. And they glowed, they glowed, feebly at first and then more brightly, as they moved together slowly, magnetised into one larger object.

  The Xeilig Ark…

  He was filled with wonder, watching as it moved, the shining surface, the inner glow. It seemed to decrease in mass then, as if shrinking, the molecular structure changing, morphing - adopting a new spherical shape which resembled a lingam. The noise, too, rumbled through him, shook and surprised him. As he reached out to take the Xeilig Ark within his hands, he felt himself begin to vibrate, as if the tremor might cause him to disintegrate and go spinning out into space. But there wasn’t space, there wasn’t time: his entire being was now being defined by the Ark, delineated by this ancient relic of a long-dead civilisation.

  Lord Damarus.

  I call upon Thee…

  His own voice seemed to be issuing from every part of his body now, through mouth, pores, blood cells. And he felt like he was rising, floating, distinct from the rigid world of logic all around him, defying the laws of the material universe.

  Come to me, O Lord. Take me!

  The humming was louder now, all consuming. He didn’t hear the artificial lights explode below, the shower of bioluminescent goo falling like worthless muck into the darkness. The humming - the voice of God Himself, he thought.

  Take me, O Damarus!

  Take my flesh as Your Own!

  And then, as he held the Xeilig Ark, he felt suddenly blank, as if he hadn’t existed until this moment, as if all memories had been erased, blank and strangely calm, at peace, undergoing a sense of oneness with everything around him, linked by all kinds of connections to the universe. Bound to the cosmos, to all matter that floated and expanded and shrank in the farthest estuaries of space, to exploding stars, spinning planets, and even to the unknowable chaos of hyperspace. He ceased to exist. Whoever Xam Bahr had been, he was no longer. He was something else now…

  Sweating, perspiring in his heavy robes, he kept up the chant that was inaudible now under the noise of the Xeilig Ark, despite being devoid of the capacity to move. His physical body was frozen. The moment was upon him. Light emanated from within his very body.

  Light.

  It was the light of the first day of the universe, the light of newness, of things freshly born; it was the light of Creation.

  And then he was Damarus, beautiful and monstrous.

  Reborn.

  Lord Damarus stood within Xam Bahr’s body, reeling in a contented, satisfied silence, shining with an intensity that suggested a warning, a warning filled with menace. The Xeilig Ark fell to the ground and the night became dark again. The Cathedral was silent, filled with stunned onlookers.

  Sai’bot looked around speechlessly, and stared at what the Xeilig Ark had made possible. His Master, reborn, in the flesh. He opened his deformed mouth to speak, but no sound came out.

  ACT FIVE: THE REBIRTH

  15

  Spring had come and gone in the desert lands of Proserpina’s western hemisphere, with all the subtlety of an iron fist in a velvet glove. For a few weeks rain fell, usually fretful, with frequent rainbows, and the land that had been bleached of colour put on a cloak of verdant, bluish grasses - in a good year, even a show of wild Yur’efna flowers, as tall as a man. It was a thing of beauty for weary human colonists to behold.

  But already the mantle of blue was withering, laying bare the scarred, spectral face of the desert, its true face, amoral and pitiless.

  There were some who found peace - or at least the possibility of peace - in the desert’s barren and empty truth: People who were born here, children of the colonists, or people who never wanted to see someplace else again, outlaws, fugitives… Even people who saw the chance to get rich here, a planet where treasures often lay right on the surface, marking the spot where veins of rich ore - Gneiss, Bistot, and especially Mercoxit - lay waiting to be sucked dry like bone marrow.

  A smart man travelling between the two settlements on this planet, sitting comfortably in a biotransport with supplies of food and water, might be glad it wasn’t raining, as visibility across the desert plains was excellent on a day like this.

  But the man on whom the sun - a spectral class M5.5 red dwarf star - shed light as it rose over the distant rim of a mesa didn’t even have clothes. From the heights of the sky, he was no more than a speck in an emptiness as vast as the sky itself, lying like a dead man in the middle of a dusty trail. He was naked, his white skin and short tawny hair caked with sweat.

  Darkness.

  At first, there was nothing.

  The man who might have been dead twitched and moaned softly, as the full-bore heat of a new day struck him. The unforgiving light of the sun shone in through his closed eyelids and reddened his skin like an open oven. Discomfort prodded him toward consciousness: he shifted again, growing more restless.

  Abruptly the man sat up with a terrified gasp, like he’d been wakened out of a nightmare. He sat sucking in air as if he had been running all night, staring at the land around him with the empty eyes of someone who had no idea what they were doing there. He felt… brittle, as though he might crack into countless pieces if he tried to move too quickly. There was a strange ringing in his ears, an odd smell in his nostrils. His eyes refused to focus. Everything seemed dreamlike. He had no idea where he was.

  Buzzard-like creatures, who had been circling on the thermals overhead, watching him with more than casual interest, canted their wings and flew off, disappointed. The man, dazzled by the light, never noticed, seeing the land around him in double vision. He kept blinking, until finally he realised - very, very vaguely - where he was.

  In the desert.

  Lost in the desert.

  He stared at his bare body, wondering where all his clothes went. And then he grimaced, abruptly aware of a sharp, deep pain in his right side where he had been laying on the hard, rocky desert floor. He covered it with his hands, leaning over. He must have looked the way he felt - and he felt like shit. But he couldn’t have been lost out here that long or he’d be dead.

  Cursing under his breath, he sat up straight, putting his hands over his knees, holding himself together. His throat was so parched he could barely swallow; his lips were cracked and his belly was tight with hunger.

  Why was he here? How had he gotten here? Where the hell was here? He couldn’t seem to remember any of it. Closing his eyes against the glare, seeing nothing but darkness when he tried to look inside himself, he focused on shutting down his emotions, slowing his breathing, getting control of himself. Try to remember, try to remember, try to remember…

  At last he opened his eyes again, strikingly blue eyes that glinted like cut sapphire. Yes…

  “Cris,” he said, his hoarse voice little more than a croak. “My name is Cris.”

  There was nothing else, at least not yet.

  His vision steadied. In the far distance he could see the blue-grey, broken-toothed profile of a mountain range; in the nearer distance he saw the mesa over which the reddish sun had just risen. On the opposite side of the trail, to the west, there was t
he edge of a weather-etched cliff of sandstone maybe seventy or eighty feet high. And down below that, tiny regularised structures erupted from the sun-baked plain, a couple of miles away at least. A haphazard collage of low-grade concrete, stone, and artificial structures of biological metamaterial - spreading outward from a central point like the spokes of a wheel. It was a settlement, of that there was no doubt, but he still had no idea where he was.

  A brisk gale was scouring the tired ground. It whipped the sand about Cris’ bare feet and legs now, threatening a storm. He stood up with some difficulty, a multitude of aches trying to drag him down. Grunting, he started in the direction of the settlement, determined to find a way down the cliff face. First, he would find some water, and clothing. Then, maybe someone could give him some answers…

  A storm was coming on the desert horizon.

  J’Onn paused in his work to stare beyond the wavering black bands of heat at the growing cloud of dust. Normally, he would have headed back for the ramshackle shelter that served as his home on the outskirts of Rhino Colony and waited the storm out there; today he did not care if the dust cloud swallowed him whole. He looked back down at his work, at the small auger sunk into the scorched ground in a pathetic attempt to find water. This hole, like all the others, was barren; there was an utter lack of moisture in the soil. J’Onn no longer thought of it as such. To his mind, soil supported life, but this bleak, parched sand supported nothing. After a restless night, he had wandered out to the field, as usual - once fertile, now no more than an extension of the desert - and begun to dig. Now the sun was overhead, and the field around him was dotted with hundreds of holes, many of them a few years old, made in happier times when water was not such a precious commodity.

  It was afternoon now, and the sun shone with unforgiving fierceness. The ground was hot enough to blister the skin beneath the fabric of J’Onn’s ragged clothes as he knelt next to the auger, but he registered no pain. It was madness to work during the worst part of the heat, madness not to take cover from the duststorm… but he was mad, mad with grief and anger at the recent loss of his wife. In fact, he had been half mad with frustration even before her death. Until the Great Drought, the land had been… not, in honesty, bountiful, but rather a place of sparse beauty. He and Za’ara had made themselves a life - a hard one, lacking comfort, but a life nonetheless. For them there had been no alternative.