The Complete New Dominion Trilogy

by Drury, Matthew J.

  “Grenade!” Chen shouted, dropping to a crouch, and Gens behind her and Zou before her did the same. She hoped Patel had heard.

  Then the grenade went off, sending a shock wave back through the passage. The walls shook and slivers of rock fell, slicing flesh and canvas and leather, bouncing off metal. But the ceiling held, the floor didn’t crack open, and an instant later Patel called out, “All clear!”

  They hustled then, stealth forgotten, wading into the smoke and dust, and a minute later Chen was out of that narrow fissure and into a much wider corridor, her back against the wall, rifle at the ready. Patel had a nasty cut along one arm and looked like he’d been worked over by a dozen large drunks, but he was still standing and still had a grip on his rifle. Prosik hadn’t been so lucky. The veteran trooper lay on the ground just beyond the fissure’s exit, blood pooling beneath him from the gaping hole in his chest and from the places where his arms had been. The Cephlack had stopped him from shooting by shearing both arms off at the elbow, then it had gutted him.

  They hadn’t even heard the first blow. Fortunately the Cephlack hadn’t been expecting a grenade. Judging from the body it had taken the impact full force in the chest and head, and had been squashed like a bug against the far wall. Chen hoped it had been painful but knew it probably hadn’t.

  “Well, they know we’re here,” she said, shaking her head. “Nothing for it, then. Leastways we don’t have to be quiet anymore.” She clicked her rifle over to full plasma auto, and heard many of the troopers doing the same.

  “Get hold of the other teams,” she told Zou. “Relay it back if you can’t get a signal to them from down here. Get everyone down here. We’re going to need them.” Zou nodded and called Gens to her, presumably to coordinate the process of reaching the other teams. Chen knew she could trust her to take care of it. Soon they’d have everyone down here with them, roughly three hundred troopers. She hoped it would be enough.

  She watched for another minute as the rest of the two teams made their way through the fissure. Trion and Cavez moved Prosik’s remains off to one side. Gina Elani, one of Gens’ team, bandaged Patel’s arm.

  Everyone was ready. Then, because this tunnel ran in two directions and she could see several branches already, Chen gritted her teeth and closed her eyes.

  More of the motobugs were touching her now, their claws and spines jabbing but not penetrating her skin, and the voices had amplified, creating a ringing echo behind her eyes and between her ears. The words were the same, though.

  “Welcome. The Swarm embraces you.”

  Shuddering, Chen opened her eyes, reassuring herself that it was just a dream. Then she walked to the other side of the fissure and let the dream take her again. It took all her willpower to come out of it, to step away from that cold, clammy, smothering greeting, but she had her answer. She gestured in that direction.

  “This way,” she told her people.

  As they followed her down the natural hallway, she hoped Kimberley was worth it. And she hoped the scene in her dream was only an interpretation of her fear, not a peek at what was really going on inside her head. Because if it was accurate, they might all be doomed, and Chen knew it would be her fault for bringing them here, to this world, to these caverns, to this mess.

  The tunnels continued, one leading to another. Chen used the dreams to find her way through each intersection, following the stronger path each time. And each time she had to force herself back to the present, back to her own flesh and blood, wrenching her mind from that stifling welcome that awaited her in the darkness. The urge to scream welled up within her and she fought it back, tightening her grip on her rifle until she was surprised the barrel and stock didn’t have her fingerprints squeezed into the hardened biological casing.

  They encountered several more Combine. Each time it was only a small group of the aliens and each time Chen’s troopers made short work of them, though not without cost. Patel had survived that first attack with a wound to one arm and made it through a second unscathed, only to have his face bitten off by a motobug that leaped from a small hole in the ceiling and tore into him on the way down. Gina Elani, the petite trooper who had bandaged Patel’s first wound, was sliced in half by a Cephlack when she stopped to give one of her fallen teammates a hand up. That teammate died as well, his chest ripped open even as Gens fired a full clip into the Combine’s back. Others also fell, many Chen knew only a little and some she didn’t even recognise except as names on a list. She vowed to look up every last one of them if she made it out of this alive. They deserved that much.

  The small Combine groupings were probably due to the narrow passages and crooked tunnels. Once or twice they found themselves in wide corridors like the first one below the chute, but those never lasted. These caverns were natural, never altered by Combine or any other, and they started and stopped, twisted and turned, dove and rose at random, going from avenuewide to stairwell-narrow in a heartbeat and doubling around razor-edged corners or ribboning off out of sight. Cracks in the floor led to other levels, as did holes in the ceiling, but some of those gaps led to tiny pockets instead, and it was impossible to guess what lay beyond each opening. One trooper died because he dropped down through a crack and fell into a magma pool, burning to ash in an instant. Another thrust his head up through a hole above and cracked his skull against the rocky ceiling of the two-foot-high space. He might have survived if he hadn’t broken his neck when he fell back to the tunnel below.

  Chen’s dreams – they were more like waking visions now, always threatening to overlap reality and overwhelm her sense of self – were all that kept them going. She heard several troopers muttering behind her, wondering how she could possibly know where to go in this maze, but Zou and the other sergeants shushed them quickly. No one really wanted to believe she didn’t know the way, anyway. That would only make this worse.

  Finally Chen led them down a short, almost straight tunnel, high enough for her to carry another trooper upright on her shoulders and wide enough for her to fling her arms out without scraping the sides. At the other end was a wide arch, its surface stone but covered by a pulsing grey-black matter that looked less like the fungus it was than exposed brains. It was the Combine ooze, the creep that had showed their presence on several planets as it crept across the surface, matching their spread beneath. It meant that Chen and her people had finally reached a place here on Erebos where the Combine had made themselves at home.

  “Ma’am!” Cavez pointed, and Chen followed his gesture, catching her breath as she saw the shape suspended near the centre of the arch. It was an eye, a human eye, or at least it would have been if humans grew twenty feet tall. A cluster of thick tendrils trailed behind it and were wrapped around what looked like massive web strands crisscrossing the arch. The eye hung from them like a horribly altered spider, wriggling as they approached its web.

  “Somebody blind that thing!” Chen shouted, and Trion took aim and fired. A single plasma bolt plunged deep into the eye, dead-centre on its massive pupil, and with a grating squawk the eye burst, showering them with bits of jellied goo. The tendrils still clung to the web, twitching slightly.

  “Guess there’s no sense knocking,” Chen muttered to Zou beside her, and the darker-skinned woman mustered a weak smile in return. The eye had obviously been a sentry, and it had seen them approaching this whole time. The Swarm knew they were here.

  “Get ready!” Chen shouted over her shoulder, knowing Zou would relay her message to the squads too far back to hear her. “We’re about to have company!”

  As if her words had been the trigger, a flutter of shapes appeared on the far side of the arch, casting shadows upon the web there. Then the strands burst and the Swarm was upon them.

  Earlier, in that fissure, Chen had wished for more room. Now she would have killed for less. The tunnel here was broad enough for three troops to stand together, and the archway filled that width. That meant the Combine had enough space to charge in a cluster, spilling thro
ugh the arch and threatening to engulf her troopers by numbers alone. A narrower space would have forced the Combine to trickle through instead of flood and they could have held them off more easily. Still, the goal wasn’t to hold them but to get past them. Chen didn’t need to close her eyes to know that Kim must be on the other side of that arch.

  Getting through was going to be a problem, though.

  She shot a Cephlack through the head with her rifle and then drew her disruptor pistol and shot another that had been about to gut Zou from behind. Steadying her disruptor, barrel atop and across her rifle, she fired one and then the other, blasting anything in her way. Motobugs were everywhere, leaping at men’s heads or chewing through their arms or clamping those massive jaws around their ankles, tangling limbs and guns and leaving them vulnerable. The Cephlacks were right behind them, as were the golems, both using spikes and blades to carve through the human forces. Chen saw Trion go down, scythes from two different Cephlacks meeting in her chest, her rifle shoved down by the blows and discharging at her feet, kicking up rock shards as the spikes struck the ground. Gens fell beneath a pack of motobugs and was literally ripped apart – Zou saw it as well and was kind enough to put a bullet through the young trooper’s head before he could register the pain. Chen’s troops were good, well-armed and well-trained and well-motivated, but they were drastically outnumbered.

  The tight quarters - wide enough for them to be surrounded but not wide enough for them to back away - didn’t help. The Combine were all linked together, speaking to each other’s minds, and that let them move as a single body. Chen’s people weren’t so lucky. They stumbled against one another, blocked one another’s shots, and sometimes even shot each other. That didn’t help.

  “We need to get inside!” she shouted to Zou. They were back-to-back, firing at anything that came too close – more than once she’d had to jerk her gun away to avoid shooting a trooper. “We don’t have time for this!”

  “Let’s go!” Zou shouted back. “Everyone, form up on me! Cover fire!” Not everyone heard her through the tumult, but enough did and some twenty men and women grouped around them, all facing outward. They began walking as a clump, locking step to avoid stumbling, firing in all directions at once. Every time someone emptied a plasma cell the neighbour took over, covering that angle until they had reloaded. The Combine couldn’t get to them, couldn’t breach that wall.

  They made it under the arch, and then they were inside. The rest of the troopers were still in the tunnel, and they waited until Chen and Zou were past the arch before unleashing a rain of bullets and plasma fire. The Combine were forced to turn their attention to the larger threat again and swarmed down the tunnel, leaving the handful around Chen with a moment to breathe and look around.

  “What is this place?” one of them, a young man named Fedders, whispered. He was shaking slightly, and Chen couldn’t blame him. What they’d just been through, and what they were seeing now, was enough to shake anyone.

  This chamber was far larger than the tunnel beyond it, wide enough for a shuttle to fit within and tall enough for one to stand upright without grazing the domed ceiling. The walls were covered in creep, which shed a faint light that pulsed all around them, leaving Chen slightly nauseous. Golems moved here and there in the room, smaller creatures like giant maggots writhing through mounds of creep piled at intervals upon the floor while Cephlacks and others stood guard.

  “It’s a breeding ground,” Chen told the others, remembering a previous encounter she’d had with them on Antiga Prime. “It’s where the Combine warrior-castes are born.” At the centre of the room was a cluster of Combine, at least forty of them, including Cephlacks and motobugs. Off to the side she spotted two massive golems, their sides pulsating as if lit from within, perched on mounds of creep and festooned with streamers of similar organic material - Chen remembered they were called Overlords and were essentially Combine commanders. She could see several Combine eggs, pulsing green and red upon their mounds of creep. But between the Combine at the centre she saw something far larger, something that glowed and gave off sparks like small lightning. She knew immediately that was her target.

  “Everyone, on me!” she shouted, raising her rifle and slamming home a fresh plasma cell. “We need to breach that thing!”

  The Combine heard her coming, or sensed her, or simply anticipated her attack. “Overlord!” something shouted, its voice an odd rasp that cut at Chen’s ears and produced a dull throb behind her eyes. “The Chrysalis is opening! Do not allow any Terrans near it!”

  One of the golem overlords lifted its front end toward the archway and, responding to its mental commands, the lesser Combine pulled away from the cocoon and charged toward the Terrans. The other overlord hunched closer to the strange pulsing oblong, like a protective mother warily circling her prize egg.

  Chen and her team braced themselves for the moment of contact. Just before the Combine reached them, however, Zou pulled a grenade from her vest, primed it, and lobbed it at the approaching creatures. It struck just before a Cephlack and blew the creature apart as it detonated, the blast taking several others with it and battering a dozen more aside. Chen quickly fired into those dazed Combine, killing them before they could recover. Then the rest were upon them and she was back to firing disruptor over rifle and rifle under disruptor, swivelling the barrels left and right to keep her front covered.

  “Get going, sir!” Zou shouted at her, nodding her chin toward the cocoon. “Take care of that thing! We’ve got this!”

  Chen hesitated only a second, then nodded. “Stay alive!” she hollered, then fired both guns on full auto in a semicircle before her. The Combine there were blasted to bits, and before any others could fill the gap she had charged through and was past them. Behind her she heard another grenade go off, and the sound of gunfire increased. Zou and the others were covering her charge. She knew, deep down, that it would probably mean their deaths. They knew it too. But this was the job. This was why they’d come.

  The creep underfoot clung to her boots and Chen’s outright run turned into a stumbling jog, but she still covered the distance to the cocoon before any other Combine could come after her. She ejected the spent cells and magazines from each gun and reloaded as she slowed to avoid crashing into the thing. She targeted the approaching overlord, but it paused and swivelled away, inching back until it had vanished into the haze of creep strands that hung in tatters from the ceiling.

  Now it was just Chen and the cocoon.

  18

  The thing was easily twice her size, she realised as she examined it more closely. Its surface was pocked and pitted, lumpy like thick porridge, and it writhed as she watched. The thing, that shell itself, was alive! It was still giving off sparks, and her hair stood on end as she approached it. But Chen didn’t back away.

  “Kimberley?” Reaching out, she set one hand upon the thing, feeling the jolt as her fingers touched it through her gloves. She could just make out a shape within, twisting, limbs flailing against the cocoon’s pulpy shell. But this couldn’t be Kimberley Stefánsson – even though she could see only a hazy outline, the figure within had too many limbs.

  Perhaps it was the touch of her hand against it, or the sense of her proximity. Perhaps it was simply a matter of timing. But whatever the reason, as she watched Chen saw first one limb lash out, then another, striking the cocoon near the top – and slicing through, a wicked spike drilling its way out. The cocoon stretched as the rest of the spike tried to tear free, its sticky surface pushed to the limit. Another hard thrust came from within, a second spike appearing, the cocoon’s upper edge distended farther – and then it burst like a rotten melon, the skin peeling away and the interior spurting forth. Without the surface tension the rest of the skin fell away limp, pooling on the ground, and Chen stepped back to avoid suffocating within its slick folds. Thick, oily liquid followed it down, washing across her boots and spreading a thin sheet across the chamber floor. The creep absorbed it and thickened,
growing darker, and its pulse became stronger. But Chen didn’t notice that. She was too busy gaping at the figure that stood revealed as the cocoon – what she now remembered the Combine calling a Chrysalis – fell away.

  Kimberley Stefánsson was a tall, pretty woman with a fine, full figure. She had pale skin turned almost tan by her travels, piercing midnight-blue eyes, a lush mouth a little too wide for her heartshaped face, and a glorious mane of blonde hair she kept tied back when playing Blitzball. She was the most stunning and infuriating woman Chen had ever met.

  This was not Kimberley Stefánsson. This was some winged horror from her worst nightmares. It was nothing like the woman she had been protecting. Or, rather, it was. But it wasn’t. Chen still stared, her weapons forgotten, the battle behind her forgotten. Nothing mattered, nothing even entered her head but the woman – the creature – before her. It had Kimberley’s stature, her build, even her face. The skin was wrong, though, a mottled green that looked slick somehow, like the flesh of a dolphin or a seal. In many places it was hard and glossy, a protective shell, though she could see no pattern to the protection’s placement. The armour extended to spikes over one shoulder, at the elbows, along the back of her hands, and along her legs. The eyes were still the same shape but yellow instead of blue, a bright yellow with strangely shifting pupils. The hair, that wonderful blonde hair, was now stalks, somewhere between medusa-like tentacles and spikes, sharp and cylindrical but limp around her face and segmented like an insect’s legs – or a human’s bones. The part that threw her the most, however, the part that had made Chen think it could not be her, was what had torn through the Chrysalis, what she had seen flailing within the cocoon just before that.