The Complete New Dominion Trilogy

by Drury, Matthew J.

  “Kimberley and I will be leaving here soon,” Chen said. “Within hours. Now that the Combine have noticed her presence here, I do not wish to bring any further death and destruction to this world.”

  “You will do what you must,” Esme replied confidently. She cast a weather eye at the descending clouds, then turned and started the long walk up the slope toward where Kimberley and the Paladins waited patiently. “Come with me, good people. We have buried our dead and talked of wars and of enemies old and enemies still living. Let us set all that aside for a moment. Let us go and make a toast to the living and celebrate the memories of those we love and those we have let go before us.”

  Chen paused for one last instant at the grave and bowed her head. “When you see my mother and father,” she murmured, “tell them their daughter still loves them.” She crossed herself again, then trailed after Esme and the others, never looking back as the thickening mist fell over the graveyard like a shroud.

  The aircab let her out at the perimeter wall of her apartment complex, and Lorelei Chen glanced back to watch the driverless vehicle nose its way back into the flow of traffic, the sensor antennae along the hood of the thing feeling the air. The fare from the city’s outskirts had claimed the last of the money on the discretionary credit chip Esme had given her. The flight back had passed in a blur; Chen’s gaze turned inward, passing the time with the ebb and flow of the same emotions over and over again. She felt disgusted at herself for her weakness, angry at what had happened, sad at the thought of losing Paramo, numb and furious, full of regret and fear. But mostly she felt hollowed out inside. All the work, all the killing, everything she’d done in the endless months and years of her personal quest across time and dimension, now was unravelling all around her. She had destroyed her life and career for the sake of something that only she seemed able to see, for a truth, a destiny that no one else could even know, or imagine.

  As she walked the short distance to the lobby of the building, the question echoed in her mind: Is it worth it?

  Inside, she waved her hand over the entry pad to her apartment and ignored the glow of the messaging system, dropping her bag on the sofa. In the sitting room, the holowall activated automatically, blipping to the local Laputa News affiliate preset. The screen showed a report about the upcoming Factional Science Board caucus on the proposed ‘Mindscape’ – a database of all human thoughts, actions and emotions; the conference was getting a lot of heat from the pro-human, anti-technology lobby, and it seemed like every day a new busload of protestors arrived in the capital.

  She ignored the low burble of the OLED screen and fished out the Xeilig Ark, leaving it on the countertop in the small, plastic-white kitchen, mechanically moving through the motions of swigging fresh water from a carton in the refrigeration unit. The apartment was dim; the sunny magnolia colours did little to lift the tone of the gloom leaking in from the dull, low cloud smothering the sky.

  Chen grasped the carton in her hand, her fingers deadening with the cold.

  Is it worth it?

  The question hammered at her in the silence. Maybe she had a choice before, but now… now the Combine would be coming here, and she would have no option but to take Kimberley Stefánsson away from this place to avoid another catastrophe. She had seen them annihilate entire worlds in their search for Kim, unleash Asterites with no thought to the innocent lives which got in the way. A grimace crossed her face and she went to the alcove where a supply of food sticks sat inside a cupboard. She took a bite out of one and chewed thoughtfully, then went to sit on the sofa.

  She had an obligation to keep Kim safe, she still felt strongly about that. But at what cost could she continue doing this? The past three years felt like she had been going around in circles, trying to escape from a foe that was just too resourceful and too powerful to run from forever – and she was losing sight of her true goal, the death of Cris and preventing Damarus from coming to power.

  A chime sounded through the apartment, and Chen flinched in surprise. The house was announcing a visitor at the main entrance. That would be her, right on time. Chen left the half-eaten food stick on the sofa and went to the control panel, giving a command to open the door.

  Kimberley Stefánsson entered, her gaze taking in the surroundings. Chen’s apartment was different from the few other habitats she had seen or heard about in the Silver City. It was not as spare or minimalistic. Indeed, Lora’s was filled with items. On one wall she had carefully arranged a display of weapons and on another were pictures from Earth history. E-papers were evenly piled on a long table beside an impressive fireplace. In an open closet, clothes were not only hung meticulously, but arranged according to the type of uniform or dress. As she walked across the sitting room, Kim paused to glance at a three-dimensional photograph on the wall: Two figures, Lora Chen and a good-looking blonde woman, military officers. Both in their thirties, maybe a few years between them. Smiling, arms around each other.

  Chen smiled at Kim as she entered, though the expression was forced. She led her up a spiral staircase with an aluminium core handrail toward a set of balcony doors, which opened onto a veranda overlooking the private gardens. They both sat in comfortable chairs, looking toward an impressive view of the Silver City beyond.

  The tone of Chen’s voice was gentle, but the words felt like harsh blows. “Kimberley, it’s time to leave. We’ve put it off for too long already.”

  “I know,” Kim replied. “But where will we go?”

  “I have given it much thought over the past few days,” Chen told her uneasily. “But you may not like what I am about to suggest.”

  “Try me.”

  Chen shifted uncomfortably. “I want to travel to the past, by around three hundred years. To the Cryonics Institute in Clinton Township, Michigan.”

  Kim remained solemnly quiet for a moment, blinking, then said, “So you want to kill him again?”

  A defiant grimace settled on Chen’s face. “Yes. Now that I have the ability to target a specific time and place with the Ark, I have an opportunity to strike at him when he is most vulnerable. The press of a button is all it will take.”

  “You’re talking about taking out my dad while he sleeps?”

  “I am. This has always been my plan, Kimberley. You’ve known this all along. If you agree to participate, I’ll take you anywhere you want to go after that. It is up to you, Kimberley Stefánsson.”

  Kim sensed the underlying meaning in Chen’s statement; she heard the words as a command. She shook her head back at the vision. “I can’t kill my dad, Lora. I mean, I can’t be a part of that.”

  “You should not think of that man as your father.” Chen’s voice was cold and distant. “When I saw what was happening to him, I tried to dissuade him, to draw him back from that precipice. But he rejected me. When your father emerged from that ancient city on Deadworld, the change was forever - he was Damarus, without a trace of Cristian Stefánsson. Irredeemably dark. Kept alive only by the Eidolon and his own black will.” Tears ran down her cheeks as she spoke the words. Part of her knew it to be a lie. There was still a chance of redeeming Cris, of changing the past for the better…but too much had happened since then. She didn’t feel strong enough to face that possibility anymore.

  “How can you be sure it will achieve anything?” Kim said with all the conviction she could muster. She finished with her jaw clenched very tightly, knowing that she had to be the strong one here, for Chen’s sake more than for her own. “You tried to kill him before. It didn’t work.”

  Chen nodded. Her exasperation melted, leaving only sorrow in its wake. “I have to try,” she said, “or we could be running from the Combine forever. Could you do that, Kimberley? Could you live like that? I’ve been doing it for three years. It’s not easy. By killing him, there’s still a chance this could end, however small.”

  Kim turned away, looking wounded, and she winced. She stared at the city skyline, her face twisting this way and that as she tried to sort through
her emotions. She stared at Chen intensely for a moment, then looked back to the city, seeming defeated. “You’re right,” she said finally. “It’s our best shot at stopping all this, I suppose.”

  “I currently have no other plan that could, potentially, accomplish as much as this one.” She shook her head remorsefully, then locked her eyes on Kim’s eyes, and put as much of her spirit as she could into the gaze, to leave it forever imprinted on Kim’s mind. “I wish there were another way.”

  Kim thought about what Chen had said for a moment, trying to sort through her multiplicity of feelings. “I have faith in you, Lorelei Chen,” she said. “That’s why we’re going to do it.”

  14

  AD 2099

  CLINTON TOWNSHIP, MICHIGAN

  Freshly materialised, Lorelei Chen drew in a breath and savoured the stinging cold of a spring Michigan night upon her face, feeling as though she had stepped inside a history text, one both thrilling and horrific. For there in front of her – and Kimberley Stefánsson – was the famous Cryonics Institute, situated at the foot of a mountain some miles outside of Clinton Township.

  That was the thrilling part; but the horror came from the sight of the great smouldering craters caused by a huge avalanche of the mountain above; their arrival through time and space had displaced a wave of crackling energy that had surged outward, dislodging massive quantities of rock from the mountain – which had then proceeded to tumble down, bouncing and flying along ballistic trajectories. At least part of the underground cryopreservation facility’s structure had now collapsed, or was in danger of doing so.

  There, beneath the scarred and muddy earth, Cristian Stefánsson might already be dead.

  For an instant, the two of them hesitated at the massive concrete door covering the actual chamber where the cryogenic cylinders were stored. No obvious means of entry there; Chen scanned the broken, uneven, sometimes smoking ground with a Vei’nl, and at last spied beneath a dirt mound a metal staircase leading downward.

  She signalled to Kimberley and pointed. “There.” The word emerged as white mist and hung in the starkly cold air.

  So they proceeded underground, Chen leading the way. The staircase, rickety and half rusted, led directly to what had been the control room on level B1, where bored scientists had sat for countless hours monitoring liquid nitrogen levels. The control room ceiling was partially collapsed, most of the equipment crushed beneath chunks of concrete and fallen beams. Three of the consoles were illuminated and active, but several others were dark. The lighting, too, was dimmed, and it, along with the wisp-like haze of dust, gave the chamber an unsettlingly eerie air. In the ghostly shadows, crushed to death beneath one of the dully gleaming beams, lay the sprawled corpse of a dark-haired man.

  His face was turned away, half hidden by the beam, which lay on a diagonal across his back, from his left ear to his right hip. He lay atop the corpse of a woman; apparently his last act had been to shelter her.

  In another corner of the room, another man had apparently been sitting in a chair at the console and had been thrown backward when the ceiling caved in on him. His face was covered by a mountain of rocks and silt, but his legs were visible.

  The sights chilled Lorelei Chen to the bone. She stood quietly while Kimberley examined them all, checking pulses and breathing, then looked askance when the younger woman approached her to report.

  “They’re all dead.”

  Chen nodded, grim. “This is my fault. Our temporal incursion here caused this rockfall.” She gritted her teeth, reminded once again of the cost of her actions. Is it worth it? “Come on – let’s check on the cryogenic cylinders.”

  Chen had been here before, so she was able to lead the way knowledgeably through the facility’s corridors; yet she could not get over how different it seemed now, in the late twenty-first century. She had visited it in the twenty-fifth, and it had been a dirty, dark ruin then, overgrown with rotting vegetation and blackened by fire and the passage of centuries.

  Now it seemed clean, well-lit, and the walls had a cheerful shrine, dotted with commemorative plaques bearing the likenesses of all the hundreds of people preserved here. Seeing it covered with dust and smoking soot and bloodied corpses, brought the reality home somewhat. Lots of people had died here today, but Lorelei Chen supposed that this was inevitable anyway – with a huge asteroid in space due to wipe out most of the Earth’s life forms within thirty or so years. This was where Cris had existed, in a violent, hostile past. No one here knew who he would ultimately turn out to be; no one would have believed, in those hard, embittered times, that a man with colorectal cancer being cryopreserved here would become the Earth’s salvation, one of the greatest religious figures in history, and also it’s most hated and evil tyrant.

  Silently, Chen made a solemn promise to herself: that she would not permit any of it to happen. Here and now, one way or another, Cristian Stefánsson was going to die. History would be changed for the better.

  With Kimberley beside her, she headed out into the corridor that led directly to the cryopreservation chamber.

  Moments before, Dr. Lisa Sandberg had staggered through the same control room, wiping angry tears away with the back of her hand. She had known the three people killed – Paul and Grace Hagen and Andy Zawacki – in this little community, everyone knew everyone else. As best she could figure, some kind of atmospheric disturbance had been the catalyst which caused the mountain to avalanche, a wave of energy which ploughed into it from the south. But what, exactly, had happened to destabilise the rock? Numerous possibilities hurtled through her well-trained scientific mind: discontinuities within the rockmass itself? Weathering susceptibility? Ground and surface water buildup, or freeze-thaw? Root-wedging? It could have been any number of external stresses. The Cryonics Institute was not located near to any major fault lines, and this kind of thing had never occurred here before, that much was certain.

  Who could have known such a terrible thing could happen?

  Almost as bad as the deaths was the damage done. The minute she saw the collapsed ceiling and the crushed consoles, any hope she’d had for salvaging the facility, and the people in cryostasis here, died. The computer that constantly monitored the liquid nitrogen levels in the cryogenic facility lay buried beneath a mound of rubble; the recently upgraded console that normally displayed a schematic of the cylinders and warned of leakage or malfunction had gone distressingly dark.

  At best, this would just be damaged computer systems and a jolt to the electrical systems; at worst…

  She could not bring herself to finish the thought. Instead, she carefully made her way through the control room – being forced once to squeeze through a narrow opening between the wall and the largest pile of concrete chunks and steel beams that buried Grace and her husband. Andy lay face down, his boots extending out beyond the hillock of rubble, their patched, worn soles a mere foot from the wall; Lisa moaned softly as she was forced to brush against them.

  Ironically, the corridor that led toward the cryopreservation chamber itself was less damaged and thus more easily navigable. Lisa made her way quickly to the main door – still emergency-sealed, still protecting her from whatever might lie inside.

  She let go a long exhalation of pure relief. The emergency door, at least, had done what it was supposed to do in such a crisis, closed firmly and not given way – a sign that the cryocylinders might be basically intact and that the people within hadn’t all been killed without even being aware of it.

  Even so, she hesitated. There was simply no way to know whether the inner chamber had been saved, with the computer destroyed. To know, one way or another, she would just have to enter it. Lisa drew a breath, stepped forward and placed her hand on the still-functioning electronic palm reader. Sparks flew, and the great steel door rumbled as it slid slowly over the smooth tiled floor.

  When it was open, she released all the air in her lungs with a single gusting sigh. If there was a radiation leak in here, she was already a dead wom
an. Nothing to be done about it; she didn’t care, she told herself, didn’t care. Hadn’t cared about anything after her fiancé died.

  And yet, stepping over the threshold onto the catwalk, she felt fear seize her imagination. Her skin began to tingle and crawl – was she sensing the radiation? – and her breathing grew shallow, as if her lungs rebelled at the notion of taking in tainted air.

  Lisa stood on the highest catwalk, the one that led to the dozens of rows of cryogenic cylinders in the vast chamber’s heart. Cylinders of stainless steel and glass, connected by tubing. Dozens of them also lined most of the walls. Beneath, two more floors of metal scaffolding led to further cylinders. As soon as possible after legal death, these patients had been infused with a substance to prevent ice formation, cooled to a temperature where physical decay essentially stopped, and were then maintained indefinitely in this cryostasis (that is, stored in liquid nitrogen). When and if future medical technology allowed, the patients ultimately hoped to be healed, rejuvenated, revived, and awakened to a greatly extended life in youthful good health, free from disease or the aging process. However, their chances didn’t look too good today. The ground level was scattered with tools and equipment, partially buried beneath chunks of fallen ceiling; all cylinders, including the catwalks, were sprinkled with rubble and the same pulverised-concrete dust that had coated the outer control room.

  Worse, some of them were scorched, as if the mysterious and sudden rockfall had caused them to malfunction and overheat, leaving the silent message: Do not dare hope in this… See how easily they are damaged?

  There was damage, yes, but perhaps not irreparable: most of the cylinders seemed intact. If they could be extracted and transported to a different site, maybe, there would be hope for the patients.

  Boots ringing against the metal grating, Lisa ran across the trembling catwalk. A sweep of her flashlight revealed that a huge chunk of the ceiling had smashed its way across the room, skittering over the equipment and leaving spots of damage before ending in a deep gouge in the ground level, which just happened to serve as the major shield that protected the rest of the facility from the fusion reactor on level B3. Had it been pierced, the reactor would have been exposed, and the entire complex – and most of Michigan – would have gone to kingdom come in a white-hot blaze of glory.