The Complete New Dominion Trilogy

by Drury, Matthew J.

  “Go!” she commanded.

  Kim looked at the high bridge road ahead of them. Already it was cracking and crumbling as the Asterite’s insatiable hunger focused upon it. Within moments it would fall away completely. With one last doubtful look at Chen, the blitzer launched herself forward, running nimbly across the broken masonry. Behind her the vortex swirled, causing sections of the road to come away from its tenuous holdings and spiral up toward the infernal mouth of the beast.

  Kim stumbled, almost falling, and with her remaining momentum launched herself bodily at the undamaged bridge section metres away from her. Only just making it she caught the broken lip with both hands and hung there dazed for a moment. Around her the bridge flew away completely, along with surrounding trees, buildings, cars, lamp standards… ripped from their foundations.

  As she began to pull herself up Chen appeared above her, looking down with interest.

  “Hey!” Kim called, expecting the woman to give her a hand.

  Chen turned her head upward and said, “One more moment, Kimberley. I’m going to kill this thing. Trust me.”

  It was then that Kim noticed the heaving, spinning vortex directly above them. The centre of the vortex shone brightly, full of fire and destruction. Around them pieces of building, road and other debris were being sucked upward toward the mass and the piece of bridge Kim clung to jerked free of its foundations and began to rise as well. So this is how it is going to end, the blitzer thought detachedly, screaming. She saw Chen holding the device up again, the strange device… then Chen was reaching down and grasping her jacket. Kim grunted as the older woman hauled her upward and looked her in the eye.

  “This is it,” Chen said as the blitzer grasped her wrists with both hands. “Now brace yourself. This is going to feel… a little weird.”

  Kim struggled briefly against the older woman’s grip, when suddenly they both seemed to stretch upward into the swirling light above them, the strange device glowing brighter than the sun, enveloping her senses. Kim’s eyes grew and she let out a yell of surprise and fear as the world turned white.

  Light.

  Endless, infinite light, stretching in every conceivable direction, like an ocean.

  A feeling of purity, of Oneness, of being complete. A drop of water in that ocean.

  Am I dead?

  Was this what it was like to be dead? Was this… some kind of Heaven, or Hyperuranion?

  With some effort, she connected with her conscious self. Kim felt lucid, weightless, and as her senses returned she squinted her eyes, trying to make sense of this strange place. A moment later, she realised she was suspended in the air high above a giant mountain floating in the light. All around her were large cubes, strange tangles of geometric shapes, abstract polygonal formations, among other indescribable oddities. She frowned, realising vaguely that she had to be dreaming. Waking people did not experience such impossible things.

  Kimberley…

  A voice from below cut through her thoughts. She looked around, trying to ascertain its source.

  Kimberley! The voice came again, stronger this time. A memory tugged at her; she knew that voice.

  My old man? She thought incredulously. As she cast around she suddenly noticed a white cube-like platform hovering over the mountain below. On it stood a familiar figure. A man Kim had not seen in twenty years - her father.

  Tears streamed down her face. “Dad. Daddy? Is… Is it really you?”

  It couldn’t be. She’d witnessed him die…

  We are the Dwellers of the Threshold, the voice of Cristian Stefánsson said, though his mouth did not appear to move. We are everything you are.

  Kim felt confused. “I don’t understand. Is this real?” She floated downward through the ethereal light, trying to force herself awake at the same time, but when she got closer to the platform, the figure shrunk as if in a ghostly vision, and turned into herself, aged eleven. Kim stared aghast at the small figure, who stared right back, and suddenly felt very lonely.

  Then for the second time that day, the world turned white.

  After what seemed like hours, Kim opened her eyes again, something tingling through her. There was no pain, only confusion. She focused her vision, and saw she was naked, her body pierced with dozens of acupuncture-like needles wired to a strange device. She tried to speak, but made no sound. There were dark figures standing over her, but she couldn’t quite make them out.

  “Paramo, ah tin’ke W'-exùn å getten somvAn. Dis fame es wAk’e oop.” She recognised the voice as that of Lorelei Chen. But what language was that? It was like nothing she had ever heard before.

  “Gid,” said another voice, an old man. “Ken yA hAr m'-eùn, Kimberley?”

  She frowned. Overhead fluorescent lights burned unnaturally bright light. “What’s happening?” she whimpered. She felt dizzy, like she was tumbling down and down, centrifugal force crushing in on her.

  “Rest, Kimberley,” Lorelei Chen said reassuringly. “The answers are coming…”

  Exhaling one trembling breath, Kimberley Stefánsson sank back into unconsciousness once again.

  Kim awoke, but she did not remember. She was not even sure of her name.

  Obviously, she was in a hospital room: even though her eyes were still closed, the most primitive, and evocative, of her senses told her that. Each breath brought the faint and not unpleasant tang of antiseptics in the air, and it triggered a memory of the time when - of course! - as a reckless teenager she had broken a rib in the Connecticut Hang-gliding Championships.

  Now it was all beginning to come back. I’m Kimberley Stefánsson, professional Blitzball Player, a striker for the Florida Fins - It seemed as if an icy hand had gripped her heart. She remembered, in slow-motion playback, that huge monstrous energy ribbon hovering above her, its thousands of light-eyes looking down. The destruction of the city, of the stadium, the raging chaos… then the overwhelming light that came from Lorelei Chen’s device. After that - one last memory, a fragment, of spinning helplessly in some white space, trying in vain to reconnect with her father.

  Well, whatever the hell had happened, she was safe now. Presumably Lorelei Chen had rescued her and brought her here – wherever here was.

  Damn Lorelei Chen! She told herself. The woman murders my father, puts a bullet in my gut and leaves me for dead – then disappears without a trace. She ruined my life, drove my mother to a mental institution… Now she comes back twenty years later to save my life? Why? And how? Should I thank her – or kill her?

  Her angry, confused train of thought was abruptly broken by the arrival of a Matron and two nurses, wearing the plain, immemorial uniform of their profession. They seemed a little surprised: Kim wondered if she had awakened ahead of schedule, and the idea gave her a childish feeling of satisfaction.

  “Hello!” she said, after several attempts; her vocal cords appeared to be very rusty. “How am I doing?”

  Matron smiled back at her and gave an obvious ‘Don’t try to talk’ command by putting a finger to her lips. Then the two nurses fussed swiftly over her with practised skill, checking pulse, temperature, reflexes. When one of them lifted her right arm and let it drop again, Kim noticed something peculiar. It fell slowly, and did not seem to weigh as much as normal. Nor, for that matter, did her body, when she attempted to move.

  What is this? she thought. Artificial gravity? Certainly not standard - I don’t weigh enough. For a moment she was reminded of the zero-g fields generated in the Blitzball stadium.

  She was about to ask the obvious question when Matron pressed something against the side of her neck; she felt a slight tingling sensation, and sank back into a dreamless sleep. Just before she became unconscious, she had time for one more puzzled thought.

  How odd - they never spoke a single word - all the time they were with me.

  When she woke again, and found Matron and nurses standing round her bed, Kim felt strong enough to assert herself.

  “Where am I? Surely you can tell me th
at!”

  The three women exchanged glances, obviously uncertain what to do next. Then Matron answered, enunciating her words very slowly and carefully: “Everything is fine, Miss Stefánsson. King Paramo and your friend, Lorelei Chen, will be here in a minute. They will explain.”

  My friend? Explain what? Thought Kim with some exasperation. But at least she speaks English, even though I can’t place her accent.

  Paramo and Chen must have been already on their way, for the door opened moments later - to give Kim a brief glimpse of a small crowd of inquisitive onlookers peering in at her. She began to feel like a new exhibit at a zoo.

  King Paramo was an elderly man, perhaps in advance of ninety years, whose features seemed to have combined key aspects of several races - Chinese, Polynesian, Nordic - in a thoroughly confusing fashion. He had a large scar etched across his tanned face and walked with a stick; despite his advanced years he still looked quite at home in his majestic royal robes. He greeted Kim by holding up his right palm, then did an obvious double-take and shook hands, with such a curious hesitation that he might have been rehearsing some quite unfamiliar gesture.

  “Glad to see you’re looking so well, Miss Stefánsson. We’ll have you up and out of here in no time.”

  She hazily recognised his tone of voice. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said.

  Lorelei Chen entered the room behind Paramo, and for the first time in her life, Kim got a clear look at the woman’s face. She was probably somewhere in her mid-forties. Maybe she had been beautiful once, but time and experience had clearly hardened her. She wore a perpetually stern, on-the-job expression, with dark circles under her eyes. She stepped forward and nodded. “Kimberley.”

  Kim gritted her teeth. “Perhaps you can answer a few questions…”

  “Of course, of course,” Paramo said. “But just a minute.”

  Paramo spoke rapidly and quietly to the Matron in the bizarre language Kim had heard earlier. She vaguely recognised the sounds of a few words, but the majority was wholly unfamiliar to her. Then the Matron nodded at one of the nurses, who waved a hand, opening a small electronic wall-cupboard, and produced a slim metal band, which she proceeded to wrap around Kim’s head.

  “What’s that for?” she asked - being one of those difficult patients, so annoying to doctors, who always want to know just what’s happening to them. “EEC readout?”

  Paramo, Chen, and the nurses looked equally baffled. Then a slow smile spread across Paramo’s face. “Oh - electro... enceph .. alo... gram,” he said slowly, as if dredging the word up from the depth of memory, “You’re quite right. We just want to monitor your brain functions. Interdimensional time travel can, evidently, have a seriously detrimental effect on some people.”

  She felt herself frowning. He didn’t just say that, did he? “Inter… what? What did you just say?”

  “Kimberley,” said Paramo, “Can I call you Kimberley?”

  Dumbly, she nodded.

  He was still speaking in that curious stilted voice, as if venturing in a foreign language. “You know, of course, that you were - rescued – by Lorelei here, from a serious disaster, in AD 2032?”

  Kim nodded agreement. “I’m beginning to suspect,” she said dryly, “that ‘rescued’ is a slight understatement.”

  Chen relaxed visibly, and a slow smile spread across her face. “You’re quite correct,” she said. “Tell me what you think happened.”

  Kim shook her head, half-laughing. A thousand ideas and theories flowed through her mind. All of them were ridiculous, just like this situation. “Well, the best case scenario is that, after I became unconscious, Lora killed that… thing in the sky, rescued me and brought me to a hospital. Where are my team mates? Where is Sarah? No one will tell me anything!”

  “All in due course…” said Paramo.

  Chen leaned forward. “And the worst case?”

  It seemed to Kimberley Stefánsson that a chill wind was blowing gently on the back of her neck. The suspicion that had been slowly forming in her mind began to solidify. “You once told me that the universe was re-writing itself. Let me guess. You’re from the future. This is the future, and you’ve brought me here - wherever ‘here’ is.”

  “Quite correct,” Paramo said. “And you’re on Earth. Well, very near it.”

  What did he mean by ‘very near it’? There was certainly a gravity field here - so she was probably inside the slowly turning wheel of an orbiting space station, or something. No matter: there was something much more important on her mind.

  “Just what date is it?” she asked, as calmly as possible.

  Paramo and Chen exchanged glances, then Chen took a long breath. “Kimberley,” she said, making a smooth switch to the role of long-time family physician, “this will be a great shock to you, but you’re capable of accepting it - and the sooner you know, the better. This is what, on your calendar, would be the twenty-sixth century. AD 2505, to be exact. Today, we know it as the two-hundred-and-ninth year of the New Dominion.”

  Kim felt faint. “Am I flipping out…? Is this real?”

  Chen took her hand. “It’s very real.”

  “I believe you,” Kim answered calmly. Then, to her great annoyance, the room started to spin around her, and she knew nothing more.

  4

  “Your father was a good man,” Lorelei Chen said. “I loved him very much.”

  “Loved him?” Kim echoed. Then she looked confused. “But you murdered him! Murdered him in cold blood!”

  Chen averted her gaze. “I… It had to be done, Kimberley. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever had to do. I had to try. Sadly, his death didn’t achieve anything.”

  “It ruined my life! That’s what it achieved!” Kim snapped, her eyes filled with tears. Her voice buckled under her heavy emotions. “You have no idea what you put me through.”

  Chen’s attention was suddenly focused elsewhere. “I thought by killing him, I could change the course of the future,” she said sorrowfully. “I thought… if I could stop him from ever entering that cryopreservation facility, it would stop him from becoming Lord Damarus centuries later. But I didn’t understand the nature of causality. I was thinking too linearly. Now, thanks to me, things are a lot worse.”

  Kim said nothing for a while, looking around the small room. The decor of King Ammold Paramo’s quarters here on the space station was Spartan without appearing uncomfortable. It would not have suited most people, reflecting as it did its owner’s peculiarly eclectic tastes. The living area radiated an aura of lean comfort with more importance attached to mental comforts than those of the awkward human body. But had she heard right? Cryopreservation facility? “That was my mother’s idea,” Kim said, her body tense, eyes fixed downward. “The Cryonics Institute.” She looked up then, catching Chen’s gaze. “Mom wanted to use the inheritance money from dad’s parents to put him in cryofreeze, in case a cure for his cancer could be found. But… how did you know about that? Are you saying we actually did that?”

  “It’s a long story,” Paramo told her. He leaned back against the wall and tugged thoughtfully at his beard, puffing slowly on a water pipe of free-form tarnished chrome. “In this universe, your father did get put into cryofreeze. He stayed there for almost five hundred years, until Lorelei Chen here revived him.”

  Kim stared, open-mouthed, as the old man related bits and pieces of a personal history that was far beyond the confines of her own existence. How her father had been obsessed with returning to his own time, how he had travelled through a wormhole and turned into an unspeakable monster bent on dominating the world and subjugating its peoples. How Lorelei Chen had, eventually, been forced to travel back through time in an attempt to prevent any of it from happening. Kim had only ever thought about her father’s death through her own childhood perceptions, and the subjective distortions that came with it, and never imagined it had been so… complicated.

  She blinked rapidly, and looked at Chen. “So… if you killed him in 2012…why di
dn’t it change things? He was dead and buried that same year. There was a beautiful ceremony. Then mom became addicted to painkillers. She… she ended up at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan. That’s why I moved to Florida, and took up Blitzball. To get away from it all.”

  Chen nodded. “Right, and you did. But my temporal incursion didn’t change anything here. It only succeeded in causing an alternate chain of events to unfold. An alternate universe, created at the moment of your father’s death. In this universe, the one I know, things stayed the same.”

  Paramo watched silently as Kimberley Stefánsson absorbed this information. The diffuse light streaming into the room from the lattice-work galleries around the upper reaches gave substance to the thin ribbons of smoke drifting from his pipe.

  After a while the blitzer stirred, evidently having finally reached the important question. She looked at Chen, an indecipherable expression crossing her face. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “The Asterite,” Chen said. “Do you remember it?”

  “Of course. That… thing… which destroyed my city. What was it?”

  “Asterites are a unique lifeform,” Chen told her. “They come from a place beyond our universes… a place of pure energy. They are delicate in appearance while blindly and insatiably feeding off the life-forces of beings and even planetary resources with its pulverising energy-beam conversion process. I was able to kill it, but my method was crude and…” She averted her gaze. “It would have destroyed your entire world along with the Asterite. But at least the other worlds in your universe will be safe now. Asterites are known to have travelled from world to world, devouring entire ecosystems…”

  Chen was still talking, but Kim heard nothing except the roaring in her ears, felt nothing save the burning in her heart. “So they’re dead,” she finally managed. She didn’t look up at Chen’s inquiring glance. “Everybody. Everybody I ever knew…”

  Chen knew what Kim was feeling. She’d seen it before, in Kim’s father, when he’d regained his memories at Lahmia. “I share your sorrow, Kimberley,” she finally ventured softly. “There was nothing you could have done. Had you been there, you’d be dead now, too, or in the hands of the Combine.”