The Complete New Dominion Trilogy

by Drury, Matthew J.

Cris turned and bolted for cover, taking advantage of Chen’s confusion. Chen went to follow him, but she stopped herself as she heard a voice calling out to her through the maelstrom of rain and wind.

  “Hey!” the voice shouted. “Who are you?”

  It appeared to be a young girl, coming toward her. Could it be Cris’ daughter, Kimberley? Whatever the case, Chen didn’t want to get a child involved in this business. It wasn’t going to be pretty. Against her better judgement, she moved toward the young girl, then reached out a hand and pushed her roughly to the ground. The girl started to cry.

  “Get out of here!” Chen roared, trying her best to scare the child away. “I’m sorry, Kimberley. Please, just go. Hide! Quickly!”

  The girl, terrified, turned and ran. Chen ignored her, content that she had scared her off, then headed back to where she had been standing just moments earlier. Before she knew it, Cris leapt from out of nowhere, grabbed her by the neck and hoisted her roughly across the front yard, hissing a curse. He stood a few inches above Chen, and stared venomously down into the woman’s green eyes.

  “Stay away from my little girl, you crazy bitch!” he roared.

  Chen grunted. “I’m just trying to protect her, Cris!”

  “Oh yeah?” he hissed. “Protect her from what? What have you done to the house? Who are you, you fucking crazy bitch?”

  Without another word, Chen gritted her teeth and shoved an elbow into his groin, freeing herself from his grip. Cris stumbled. Then she turned and launched a fist into his surprised face, knocking him back, drawing blood. She stepped toward him again, this time knocking him over the head with the butt of her pistol.

  Cris collapsed to the floor, barely conscious.

  She couldn’t afford to hesitate any longer. Tears scorched her cheeks as she raised the barrel of the weapon to his head and pulled the trigger. The sound of the blast was muffled by the storm, but the sight of his head blasting open like a burst watermelon was as horrifying as she’d always imagined.

  “I’m so sorry…” Lorelei Chen wept. “I love you, Cristian Stefánsson.”

  The next few seconds were a blur. She wandered absently, then came back and shot him again

  “NOOooooo!”

  Chen heard the girl scream, but didn’t move. Her emotions froze her to the spot, not allowing her to even breathe. After a minute or two, she blinked. Damn, she thought. I told that girl to get away. There was no need for her to see this…

  Exhausted, she moved toward the sound of Kimberley Stefánsson’s voice, eager to repair any damage that might have been done. She found the girl cowering behind a nearby tree.

  “Who are you?” the girl was saying, her voice thick with emotion.

  Chen stared at her, unsure of how to react. In all these years of planning and preparation, she hadn’t been expecting something like this. “Lora,” she said finally. “Lorelei Chen.” She sighed. “Are you okay?”

  The little girl shook her head and turned away.

  “I’m so sorry,” Chen told her. “I didn’t have a choice, Kimberley. Now, go on. Get out of here.” She turned and walked away.

  Instead of doing as she was told, the girl started following her. “No. I… I mean I can’t…”

  “No, no,” Chen said, shaking her head. “Don’t follow me. I’m a monster. Go away. I killed your father, for pity’s sake. I… I’ve lost everything and everyone that was ever important to me in my life, so don’t think I won’t kill you too.” She stared at the girl. She meant everything she had said, and didn’t have the patience to tolerate a child right now.

  “No. I’m going nowhere until I find out who you are. Why you are doing this.”

  Chen sighed heavily and did her best to ignore the girl, peering out into the cold rain. It seemed to be easing a little, judging by the splashes in the nearby lake. As she watched the watery surface, something huge, black and scaly rose to the surface, thrashed there for a moment and sank back into the depths. “The universe is re-writing itself,” she muttered, nodding to herself. Her initial instincts had to be correct. “That’s what happens when you screw with the timeline in places that you really shouldn’t.” For a moment she began to wonder what other repercussions her meddling here was going to bring. “I’m sorry, Kim,” she said again. “It should stabilise soon enough. Try not to worry.”

  The little girl shook her head. “You didn’t answer my question. Who are you?”

  Should I tell her? Chen thought to herself. She considered letting the girl in on the truth, on how she had travelled through time to assassinate her father in order to prevent a darker future, but decided against it. She didn’t want to cause any more damage to the timeline or to the girl’s psychological well-being than she already had. Her mind started to spin. A hundred replies to the girl’s innocent question flowed through her brain, a hundred possibilities… but none of them seemed appropriate. She felt horrible. Tears welled up in her eyes once again.

  Cris was dead.

  He was dead.

  Again.

  How many times have I had to endure this torture?

  Where are you, God?

  Why don’t you love me anymore?

  Lorelei Chen wasn’t even conscious of her own actions as she raised the barrel of her pistol toward the girl and pulled the trigger again.

  6

  Lorelei Chen felt overwhelmed and confused.

  Her mind swam with denial and shock. What she had just done… was unbelievable, unexpected, tragic and a crime, all at once. Now, the universe seemed to be reconfiguring itself, with objects appearing and disappearing right in front of her eyes, entire sections of the hills and landscape changing, warping, phasing in and out of existence.

  … But why was she still here? What perversion of natural laws allowed her to continue standing here, suffering in her own subjective torment? The death of Cris, right here and now, should have altered the future significantly, yet here she was, remembering…

  I still love him.

  She felt sick.

  Moving with slow but determined steps, she approached the muddy puddle where the man’s body was laying, face down and motionless. She had an overbearing urge to see his eyes, to confirm to herself that her seven-year journey was finally over. With a grunt, she used her right foot to push his body over in the mud, so that it lay face-upward.

  There was no glint of recognition in his eyes. There was only that empty, haunted look – the look of the dead.

  Chen gently closed her eyes, unsure of what to do. She stood there motionless, staring at her dead lover, then slumped to her knees and looked up, her emerald-green eyes blazing with self-hatred and rage. She replayed all of the events of her life in her head, wondering what she might have done differently, done better, to avoid taking this dark path. She should never have recovered him from that derelict cryopreservation facility in the first place, she realised, should never have taken him across the Shadowlands into the modern world. She shouldn’t have ever exiled herself from Einek! She just wanted Lenton to treat her right, to be proud of her. Now everyone was dead.

  Everybody except her. Now what was she going to do?

  The minutes slipped past and Chen just sat there, immobilised by her confusion, by a budding rage and the most profound sense of emptiness she had ever known. Only when the pale light began to grow around her, marking the onset of a new dawn, did she even remember where she was.

  “Lorelei.”

  The dead man’s head lolled, fixing his vacant stare on the dark entrance to a small cave nearby, newly bored into what had been the farmhouse driveway. A chill went through Lorelei Chen as she realised a voice had spoken her name, emanating from deep within the cave. The entrance led underground.

  She grunted and shook her head, dispelling the morbid state she had slipped into. Standing up with a weary sigh, her mind was once more focused on her duty. She gave Cris’ body a slight nod but otherwise paid him no further heed as her thoughts turned to what effect her actions could
have had on the timeline.

  Chen turned toward the cave. Part of her wanted to back away and run. But another part of her was drawn to the black maw of the tunnel. Maybe there were answers to be found inside. Something to make sense of all the death and violence; something to help her see the reasons behind her endless pain and suffering. Maybe she’d discover something to help her grasp some purpose behind everything that had happened here. Maybe a reason why God had abandoned her so many years ago…

  The air grew steadily cooler the deeper she descended. She could feel a tingling in the pit of her stomach: anticipation mixing with a sick sense of dread. She wasn’t sure what she’d find once she reached the underground tunnel’s end. What unearthly horror could possibly have spoken her name from down here? The devil, perhaps. But she was determined not to turn back.

  As the darkness enveloped her, she silently cursed herself for not bringing along a Vei’nl, or glow rod of some kind. Even a twenty-first century flashlight would have sufficed. She had the Xeilig Ark in her leather bag; getting her hands on the fabled artefact was what allowed her to travel through time in the first place. But even though the thing had many seemingly magical properties, in the darkness of the tunnel, she felt no desire to use its light to guide her. The Ark was unpredictable, and in her opinion, dangerous. It possessed a power which she could still not explain or understand, even after all these years. Besides which, the memory of Machiko’s death had tainted the prize they had sacrificed everything to gain.

  Machiko…

  With an overwhelming depression threatening to envelop her mind, she knew that if she turned back, she might never gather enough courage to make the trip down again, so she pressed on despite the darkness. She moved slowly, reaching out with her hands, trying to guide herself through the lightless tunnel. Even so she kept tripping over the uneven ground, or stubbing her toes. In the end she found it easier just to run one hand along the rocky wall and use it to guide herself.

  Her progress was slow but steady, the tunnel floor becoming steeper and steeper until she was half climbing down it in the darkness. After half an hour she noticed a faint light emanating from far ahead, a soft glow coming from the distant end of the passage. Something was making a humming, pulsing noise, almost like a heartbeat. She picked up her pace, only to trip over a small outcropping of stone jutting up from the rough-hewn ground. She fell forward with a cry of alarm, falling and tumbling down the sharp slope until she came to rest, bruised and battered, at the tunnel’s end.

  It opened into a wide, high-ceilinged chamber. Here the dim glow that had drawn her forward was reflected from flecks of crystal embedded in the surrounding stone, illuminating the cavern so she could see everything clearly. And she saw, suspended in the centre of the chamber, a huge circle of silver-white light, perfectly round. In the middle was absolutely nothing; it was featureless, an empty space, but even less than that. It looked flat and two-dimensional, and seemed to recede into the distance, further than her human vision could perceive. A few stalactites still hung from the roof high above; hundreds more lay smashed on the cavern’s floor, apparently having been dislodged when the strange orb had manifested itself. It was four meters from top to bottom, and nearly three meters across at its widest point. Its surface was a flat, dusky silver that projected a pale radiance but at the same time devoured all light reflected back to it by the crystals trapped in the surrounding walls.

  Lorelei Chen had never seen anything like it, and as she continued to look at it she felt increasingly certain this was a thing never found on Earth. Never created by any man or woman. Never conceived by a human imagination. It was something alien.

  Rising to her feet, Chen shivered. She was surprisingly cold; the orb had sucked all the warmth from the air. She took a step forward. The dust and debris crunching below her foot sounded flat and hollow, as if the thing were swallowing not just the heat of the cavern, but the noise as well.

  Pausing, she listened to the unnatural silence. She couldn’t hear anything now, but she definitely felt something. A faint, thrumming vibration running through the floor and up into her body, a steady, rhythmic pulse coming from the orb.

  Chen held her breath, unaware she was doing so, and took another tentative step forward. When nothing happened she let the air escape from her lungs with a long, soft sigh. Gathering her courage, she continued her cautious approach, reaching out a hand but never taking her eyes from the circle.

  She drew close enough to see dark bands of shadow slowly twisting and turning beneath the shimmering surface, like black smoke trapped deep within. Two more steps and she was close enough to touch it. Her hand trembling only slightly, she leaned forward and pressed her palm against the surface…

  “Lorelei.”

  As soon as her hand touched the bright surface of the orb, Lorelei Chen saw the wall of the cavern speeding toward her like a falling house. Much too fast for her to react. By the time she flinched, she was well out of the Earth’s atmosphere, accelerating through pitch silent black twisting out of control, smashing blind through speeding interstellar darkness. She felt herself glide for a second until a wrinkle in the energy field folded and threw her end over end. No gravity, no control, no sense of up or down, only the sudden bruising glances off what felt like the walls of a tunnel.

  Light…

  Infinity.

  It was out of a phantasmal chaos that her mind and body seemed to leap and stretch. Through interdimensional nothingness, she heard hideous shrieks beyond anything in her former experience or imagination. In that shrieking, she sensed oblivion, perceiving nothing but red madness and the mockery of diabolism, as farther and farther down inconceivable vistas she plummeted and reverberated. Rainbow colours and trumpeting blasts of sound that surely only God alone could comprehend: tearing through sunken convolutions of immemorial blackness without an idea of time, dimension, or form.

  Shooting past a cluster of what appeared to be new stars, there was a long flash of light, enough time to see her legs elongated, stretched miles out in front of her, until they snagged and her head came whipping past, as she fell toward a face-first collision with a gigantic planet.

  Her scream wouldn’t sound. She hit the surface of the planet, spinning through a vacuum of light and sound.

  Then arriving…

  Before she could even think, Chen materialised on a hard, rocky floor, covered in frost.

  Later, she surmised that the frost was a by-product of her molecular reconstruction. Just as microwaves could heat objects by increasing the rate of molecular movement, the effects of this ‘orb travel’ had chilled her physical body by packing her molecules tightly at the moment of reconstitution. For less than a millionth of a second, the atoms of her body were squeezed together at a rate of zero movement, long enough for her to be coated in a thin layer of ice.

  Freezing and completely disoriented, she was unable to control her body’s spastic jerks as it went into a sudden involuntary seizure. Her chest tightened and every muscle in her body began to convulse violently. She grunted, biting her tongue and frothing at the mouth. At the same time she threw her head back, dilated pupils rolling in their sockets. A lucid yet excruciating moment later, it was over.

  It was several seconds before Chen was able to shake off the dizziness and sit up. She tasted blood and vomit in her mouth, and grimaced. Then, for the first time, her eyes opened and she focused on her surroundings. When she raised her head to get her first look at the alien world, Lorelei Chen gasped.

  She appeared to be on the surface of an asteroid-like organic ‘island’ floating within a nebular void, completely surrounded by bluish mists; as her eyes gradually began to grow accustomed to the bizarre-hued gloom all around her she could just barely see the twisted trunks and roots of grotesque-looking trees growing around reddish-green water. Purple, grey… the trees had gnarled and intertwining roots that rose far above her head before they joined to form trunks. She tilted back her head and could see the branches, high a
bove, that seemed to form a canopy with the low-hanging gaseous clouds.

  “Where am I?” she muttered to herself, and the pitch of her voice was higher than normal, indicating a methane-strong atmosphere. She got to her feet, light-headed and rather shakily, then took a few steps forward into the gloom. Why had the orb brought her here? What was this place? She noticed that there was a greatly reduced gravity field here compared to Earth’s; however, given that her current environment seemed to comprise of nothing but a low mass asteroid, it was surprising that there was any appreciable gravitational pull at all, let alone a pull strong enough to retain a breathable atmosphere. The possibility occurred to her that this was another dimension or universe, in which case the entire void could have contained a breathable atmosphere. The same rules would certainly not apply.

  Even the light seemed to be behaving strangely. There seemed to be multiple sources, either through glowing clouds of gas or what seemed to be a star or some other stellar body. The effect was most unnerving. She looked around nervously at the shadows in the trees and felt frightened, miserable, and increasingly in doubt about her own sanity, when a sudden noise pierced the thick air, a high-pitched sound somewhat similar to the barking of dogs.

  Chen leaped up, grabbed her pistol, then spun around, peering into the gloom to try to find the source of the noise. As she turned she saw a creature standing directly in front of her, vaguely similar in appearance to that of a small theropod, with two short, muscular legs and a thick tail that tapered to a point. Chen immediately stepped back in surprise; this little being seemed to have materialised out of nowhere! It stood roughly one metre tall and about two metres in length, with a thorax that abruptly joined the creature’s head with no neck or other visible separation. Its overall coloration was roughly comparable to that of a spotted cat: its skin sandy brown and its upper surfaces covered in dark spots. The creature’s skin appeared to be slimy, similar to that of a terrestrial amphibian such as the frog. Two large, black, insect-like compound eyes were mounted on either side of its head. The tail had a hooked claw at its tip, though perhaps the most striking feature was a collection of bright red, squid-like tentacles surrounding its mouth. The thing fearlessly held its ground in front of the human woman, despite the pistol she carried.