The Complete New Dominion Trilogy

by Drury, Matthew J.

  Then Paramo understood what it was that was frightening him. Somewhere in those images received, the command alert had informed him that the frightening, huge, luminescent destroyer was on a precise heading toward the planet Earth.

  Slowly, Lorelei Chen’s vision began to return, each blink clearing away a bit more afterimage; her ears still rang shrilly, but she could not hear any other sound around her. Still clutching the Xeilig Ark tightly in her hands, she exhaled heavily, realising she had time jumped.

  But where am I? And when?

  She was stranded in a desert, that much was clear. She could see nothing but lifeless brown sand dunes stretching away in every direction under an intense orange-red sky, sparsely populated with xerophytes, alophytes, grasses, shrubs and trees. Down at the end of a decrepit stone platform, forty yards away, stood a pair of ancient obelisks half buried in the loose sand, remains of the Old World. She gazed around, trying to figure out where she was. Definitely Earth… the northernmost Plains of Cerbion, maybe? Except for a hot breeze there was no movement, no sound. No indication of any life. Certainly the orange-red sky suggested she had arrived sometime after the Apo’calupsis, but when…?

  A sudden stirring in the skies above distracted her from her thoughts. Clouds parted, and the wind began to gust as a giant, familiar-looking monster – a spatial entity – descended into the atmosphere, its eerie, sparkling luminescence becoming very noticeable against the darker backdrop. Chen felt a rush of dread as the size of the thing quickly blanketed the sky and grew to fill most of the horizon ahead of her.

  Her eyes filled with tears of awe.

  An Asterite…!

  She had seen one before, of course… seventeen years earlier, on the planet Sirkhari – at the other side of the known universe. Cristian Stefánsson had managed to destroy it by blowing up a star, no less – and she was sure she’d never see another one as long as she lived. Yet now, here one was, on Earth… looking just as beautiful and terrifying as she remembered.

  How?

  Its patterned colours, swirling and crackling on its surface like an impossible DNA helix, were glowing in electrical, flaming brilliance as the thing began to feed, sucking up the landscape directly beneath its ‘mouth’, heading straight toward her.

  Beneath Chen’s belly, the hot sandy ground shuddered continuously, and she knew in that moment that the Combine had sent this Asterite after her; somehow, they had traced her escape through the space-time continuum and sent this… creature… across dimensional barriers to apprehend or destroy her. The words of her ascended self echoed through her mind then, repeating themselves over and over: The Ark is controlled by emotion… As such it can be used as a weapon… You will need it to defend yourself from Asterites in the coming hours and days. The Combine will not let you go easily…

  Panicked, Chen ran, but she knew the Asterite would quickly gain on her, and she would have no choice but to confront it. She turned her head to look back, and saw a violent energy fork erupting out of the thing, a writhing yellow bolt, coming directly toward her. She gasped as it hit, engulfing her senses. She was blown to the ground, her flesh burned and eardrums stunned by the deafening shriek. Her adrenaline glands convulsed, shocking her heart into panic beating – for an instant her mind and body were numb with fear.

  As Chen fought to regain control of herself, the deafening shriek continued with an almost demoniacal quality, and she could see several wings of Terran Alliance fighters in the sky, shooting their pulse lasers at the Asterite in a desperate yet futile attempt to stop it. The fighters shuddered sickeningly, exploding like water balloons, swallowed up in the raging hellfire.

  Chen felt isolated, down on the desert floor. The sky was lit with awesome flashes of electrical energy; the ground shook in unpredictable spurts. Suddenly, a nearby tree vaulted upward, sucked into the Asterite’s vortex-like ‘mouth’. The ancient obelisks were also sucked from their places, groaning, before they exploded into a thousand pieces. Shrapnel crashed toward the ground, and Chen leapt out of the way.

  The ground rumbled again. Chen cried out in terror and stumbled, dropping the Xeilig Ark to the ground. She gasped, reaching out to pick it up, and amid the tremors and flashes of light, whipped by wind and flailing trees, she held the artefact high above her head. It was in this blazing moment that she understood her ascended self’s words: The Ark is controlled by emotion… As such it can be used as a weapon… and she raged and screamed and reached out with her emotions to crush the Asterite before it destroyed her.

  The ground shook as a fissure of steam blasted through the surface. Suddenly, the very ground on which she stood seemed to become an elevator. She was carried rapidly upward on a craggy rock formation which burst upward, out of the ground. Chen tumbled, but her concentration was total, focusing her rage and hatred.

  Huge fissures opened across the desert landscape. Mountains began to crumple in upon themselves. Light flared in multiple locations as previously inert summits were transformed into active volcanoes. The threatening yellow-red glow of fresh lava appeared as magma boiled to the surface. A massive sheet of lava, miles high, burst into the sky.

  I need to get out of here, now!

  Then, as if responding to her thoughts, the Xeilig Ark began to flash with intense white light, coalescing around Lorelei Chen as she began to dematerialise. The ground beneath her feet vanished in that moment and she began to fall, to drop away. Her last thoughts were of Machiko Fặmasika, and her desire to see her again… embracing each other like the long-lost lovers they were.

  Soundlessly, with the Asterite unfazed by what was happening, Earth imploded, crumpling in upon itself like a candy wrapper in a child’s hand. Deserts, atmosphere, oceans – all the familiar geological features that combined to give the surface of a world its character – vanished, along with cities and infrastructure and the people who had built them. In their place a brief blaze of intense light lingered on the retinas of those looking on from orbiting space stations - the last glow of the planet’s molten core, and the dying Asterite. Then it, too, was gone. Only a very small black hole remained at the interstellar coordinates where once a high civilisation had thrived. Despite having swallowed an entire world, the perpetrator was visible only to those astronomical instruments capable of recording its occultation of a few background stars.

  Earth, and the Asterite, were gone.

  By the grace of God, Lorelei Chen had escaped.

  Her time jump occurred with less than a second to spare, and once again she awoke disorientated and dazzled, suffering the ill-effects of being thrown across untold dimensions in such a relatively short moment. But something was wrong. Perhaps it had something to do with the tumultuous nature of her jump, but she noticed it straight away, before her senses had readjusted.

  She was falling, in the cradle of powerful shouting winds, snared by gravity.

  Where…?

  At first, Chen saw only flashes. Heavy rain. The glow of several moons on the wave tops of a vast ocean far below her. A flicker of light from an intense burst of lightning above as she spiralled away from it, a navigation light in the darkness. Vast, clumpy clouds, sending more lightning forking across the horizon with a continuous, frightening rapidity. There was little more to see on this violent world, other than the crashing waters below.

  For a long moment the lightning stopped; she couldn’t see the ocean rushing up to meet her, and she felt herself disconnect from reality. She could have been floating in the roaring wet darkness, lost in the starless space. Then the lightning flashed again; she squinted through the windburn and made out what she thought was the surface of the water, coming up fast, dappled by the moons’ glow. She extended her arms like they had taught her in military parachute training, making her whole body an aerofoil, trying to slow herself as much as she could. And then, when she couldn’t chance it any longer, she triggered a high-fall device in her combat suit.

  The device stuttered into life and cast a writhing sphere of electro
magnetic energy about her, lightning-like sparks flashing where the field interacted with the air molecules. The implant ran past its tolerance limit, but Chen retriggered it, cycling the device over and over. She felt it go hot, smouldering and heavy like a block of newly forged iron embedded in her back. The high-fall was not as effective as the newer systems used in modern Rãvier units, but it was what she had.

  She never felt the impact when she hit the rolling surface of the sea. It was the only mercy she had; perhaps it was the shock of the fall, perhaps her battered body shutting down for a brief moment in some attempt to protect her from greater trauma. Then the cold embrace leached the heat from her bones, and she screamed as it burned into her, and the blackness engulfed everything.

  Now she was in the frigid rise and fall of the alien waters, the salt brine smothering her with every new wave. She spun and turned, numb from the waist down. She choked and shivered, feeling the weight of her freezing body pulling on her, robbing her of all buoyancy.

  The ocean toyed with her, and then grew bored. Chen began to sink, and she couldn’t find the strength to fight the icy embrace of the waters.

  All her defiance, her determination… it was bleeding away, second by second.

  Then she saw the lights below, rising. The waters parting as something large broke the surface. She saw a shiny, beetle-like carapace, an arch of what had to be the outer shell of an amphibious bioship – an automated mining drone. Just beneath the water, ropes of steel moved past her legs, ensnaring her like some impossible squid, and then she was lifted out of the water, moving fast into the air toward a floating, shard-like structure in the distance… a city, perhaps?

  With a start, Chen’s mind filled in the gaps and she knew exactly where she was. It was Reria, a world on the outskirts of inhabited space and hiding place for the Empyreal Sun’s base of operations.

  She blacked out as the drone ship pulled her toward the citadel.

  9

  If there was a God, Lorelei Chen had never seen Him, and was somewhat dubious as to His existence. As far as she was concerned, God had abandoned her many years ago, leaving her to deal with the harsh and bitter realities that had shaped her life after the collapse of her faith. Twenty years earlier she had believed wholeheartedly in the One Religion – of which Lord Damarus was the primary spiritual figure – and she had done so since childhood. But now, after all that had happened to her, after all the pain… she thought of Damarus as her own personal Satan. Because most certainly there was a Hell, and it was called Reria.

  The ceaseless wind and rain buffeted her as she grimly made her way from the mining drone, a functional but bare-bones automated vehicle which was programmed to scour the ocean floor for raw materials, across the landing bay toward the towering structures of Reria City’s Main Citadel. It was only a few metres but that short walk, in the freezing downfall, felt as though it was ten kilometres. She staggered and swayed in the vicious wind like a drunken woman, keeping her sore, tired eyes fastened on the image of the buildings and spires growing infinitesimally closer.

  The wind howled like… like something that howled. She was so tired that she couldn’t even grasp a simile. She extended a gloved hand and finally – finally – touched a door, turned her body to block the wind as much as she could to prevent her fingers from wavering, and attempted to punch in a key code. She couldn’t see the pad; there was too much frost on her face. Muttering, she squinted against the cold and wind, entered an old Empyreal Sun code she had learned during her time fighting against the Inquisition several years earlier, and breathed a sigh of relief as the door cranked open obediently.

  The glare of the lights, which had come on automatically when the door opened, was painful after the perpetual darkness of the Reria night. Chen narrowed her eyes for a moment and dropped her frozen gloves on the floor as she moved into the building’s warmth. She blinked, realising that nobody was around.

  “Hello?” she called nervously, leaning around a metal corner. Watching with interest, she took a couple of steps back, looking nervously up and down the corridor. Any second she expected to see a squad of angry Empyreal Sun genome soldiers racing around a corner toward her, alerted by some hidden alarm she had unknowingly triggered. But nobody came: the adjacent corridor was also deserted, which seemed unusual for a facility of this importance.

  Chen took a deep breath. She knew that Reria had been abandoned by the Empyreal Sun prior to their invasion of the Nommos Empire and later, Earth. It seemed likely, therefore, she had arrived some time after that… though there was no way to tell exactly when. Just in case she was wrong, she hugged the walls as she made her way down the long corridor, trying to pass quickly before any security holocameras, lit windows or open doors, slipping furtively from shadow to shadow. She hastily examined each room in passing, noting that they too seemed deserted.

  Finally she entered a computer control room, and trudged over to a Villore Holoserver, an out-of-date tangle of dinged metal, wires, and projected lights. She ran her fingers through her dark hair, and saw that a red light was flashing on the console.

  Lorelei Chen blinked her emerald-green eyes, not sure if the flashing red was real or a pleasant hallucination caused by time travel-induced delirium. No, it was there, blinking cheerily as if it were on an old Christmas tree back in the twenty-first century, back when there was a Christmas… before Damarus came along and changed everything.

  Worry flooded her as she looked over the holographic readouts. As she stared, she saw a tiny dot dropping away from orbit and heading toward the floating cities below. It was a bioship bearing the transponder codes of the Daedalus – the Terran Alliance Warmaster’s ship…

  Chen stood quite still, staring at the tiny dot as it moved on the readout. It felt very familiar to her, somehow. Like a small child, she felt entranced by it. And then, all at once, in the midst of the stillness of her contemplation, she grew absolutely motionless: not a breath, not even a heartbeat stirred to mar her concentration. What was this déjà vu she felt…? Some echo, some vibration apprehended only by her… swirled the moment and altered the very shape of her perception. It was something she had never quite experienced before.

  Then she realised with a start: she remembered this! Her past self, along with Machiko Fặmasika, was aboard the Daedalus, making her way down to the planet to gather information on the enemy’s base of operations – as she had done so herself seven years earlier. She also realised, at that moment, that the city’s defence systems were still active and that the Daedalus was blundering straight into them – if she didn’t act fast, Machiko and her past self would both be killed by Reria City’s automated particle cannons.

  Chen worked furiously at the control panel, panicked, shutting down every defence system she could see. A cacophony of alarms erupted from the control console as she did so, alerting her that Reria City would be defenceless and at risk of attack. Her gaze flew to the status lights of the particle cannons lining the citadel’s main landing pad, and sure enough, they showed to be deactivated. And not before time, as the Daedalus was already being guided by the platform’s automated tractoring system.

  She leaned back and exhaled a sigh of relief, preparing herself for the encounter which she knew would inevitably lie ahead.

  This would be the first time she would ever meet herself from the past.

  Through the dirty glass of a reinforced window, Chen watched the lights of Reria City turn dim as the sky grew lighter, losing herself in the passage of the clouds overhead, the relentless lightning forks, and the never-ending wash of the rain against the dark, shard-like structures which floated ominously out in the fog.

  Sleep, when she’d been able to snatch a little of it, was a fitful and troubled thing. Chen couldn’t settle. She dreamed about skies full of squawking ravens, and vast black wings that wheeled and turned in the sky, blotting out the watery glow of a sullen sun. In the end, Chen stayed awake, keeping to the shadows while she waited for Machiko and her past se
lf to make their way into the building. A couple of hours passed, and she knew it wouldn’t be long now.

  So she went to the windows and watched the march of the morning approaching – at least what passed for morning on a world in this tumultuous region of the galaxy. Looking out at the more distant buildings of the city, Chen absently wondered who was out there, in space, looking for her. More Asterites? Armies of golems? The Overmind would no doubt be sending a capture team, she imagined, or a search-and-destroy team. The spider-like creature would have probably considered it a personal slight that her escape from the dungeon, then the first Asterite, had happened on its watch. Sorrow crossed her face. Destroying the Asterite had cost so much more than just the giant entity’s life; somehow, she could feel the deaths of every living being on the planet as she had escaped. At what cost had she managed to stay alive…?

  What have I done?

  She closed her eyes at the horror of her thoughts.

  Why was this happening to her? She didn’t want to know the answers to her questions, didn’t want to imagine the looks in the eyes of the golems who had undoubtedly been dispatched to execute her. All of them would be hunting her down across the space-time continuum now, hungry for her blood, and she would never be safe. Who knew what methods they had of hunting her down and killing her?

  She wanted so much to run, to give in to the base impulse that tensed in the muscles of her hands. But anywhere she went, she would be prey. If her suspicions were true, she had nowhere to go. Even if they were not, the fact did not change. Lorelei Chen was alone, and she had been forced into a single choice she did not want to make.

  Do I kill myself? Do I end my own life?

  But then she remembered Kimberley Stefánsson, and the danger she was in. They don’t care about me, she thought, with a fresh, wild surge of horror. It’s Kim they’re after…