The Complete New Dominion Trilogy

by Drury, Matthew J.

  Lora was afraid of it. Small and fragile and wounded though it was, she did not want to approach it. Nevertheless she drew slowly nearer, ready to jump back at any moment. Soon she stood near enough to touch it, yet she could not bring herself to do it. She felt like a coward. She ought to comfort it, but it repulsed her.

  “The Eidolon cannot be helped.”

  She spun around. Cristian Stefánsson was walking toward her through the light, wearing sweeping white robes.

  “Cris!”

  He spread his arms wide, and she ran to him. The emotion took them; neither could resist it. They came together like magnets, held each other. They embraced, kissed, full of fire and hope.

  The words erupted from Lora unbidden, uncontrollable, lava blasted from a volcanic explosion: “I love you!”

  And Cris nodded. “I love you too, Lora. Come with me.”

  Stunned, Lora followed as Cris strode away from where the broken monster lay whimpering. She looked at his face, his dark hair, the piercingly blue eyes. Everything was as she had remembered it. And yet…

  “But you’re dead,” said Lora.

  Cris nodded.

  “I’m dead too?”

  “Yes,” he told her. “I’m afraid so. But by killing yourself the way you did, you forced Damarus to confront his feelings for you. His humanity. His love. Do you see that?” He pointed then, extending a finger toward the horizon. There, the light appeared to change colour, swirling around with the mist, forming a cyclone-like funnel which led upward, to a distant and magnificent point of intense brightness.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The Source of the Light,” said Cris, smiling broadly. “It is Love, the primordial existence. And through that love, Damarus’ chains were broken.”

  Lora could feel it. Never before had she been so utterly, so palpably content.

  “I know,” she said. Then she was distracted by the whimpering and thumping of the agonised creature behind them and glanced back at it yet again.

  “What of the Eidolon?”

  “It is stuck between the Realm of Acmon, and the human world. Now it is isolated, but the Combine are harnessing its power, as you know, to infest the multiverse with their Swarm. It is a stain upon the All which must be cleansed forever.”

  “The Eidolon must be destroyed,” said Lora, and Cris smiled.

  “You have the Power of the All now,” he told her.

  “Why does it have to be me?”

  “Because only you can do it. The terrible power of your sacrifice at Laputa has given you the strength you need to defeat the Eidolon. Your destinies are wrapped together, more than you or I could possibly understand.”

  “What about us?” she asked, feeling sad. “Will we be together, in the end?”

  Cris smiled at her. “I cannot promise it, Lora. Who knows what lies in store for us, when we become One with the All? What I do know is this. I love you, Lora. That is all that matters, in the end.”

  Lora nodded and sighed. For a long moment they looked into each other’s faces. “I will see you again,” she whispered.

  “At the end,” Cris said, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Lora’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

  At the end…

  AD 2505 (209 ND)

  The last thing Mobit Akhragan saw were the enemy torpedoes blowing less than fifty metres ahead of his ship. He thought of the warm hills of his family’s estate on Laputa and smiled as the blast wave blew his ship apart. The forward momentum of what had been the aft end of his destroyer, however, continued on, even as it died, adding its thousand tons of mass into the detonating firestorm of the torpedoes impacting against the Victory’s overloaded shields. Most of the mass was repelled away, but the aft end of the ship, engines still pulsing, even as the ship ahead of it vaporised, continued onward, driving through the shattered hull, pushing before it fragments of bulkheads, decking, and those few still on board. The engine mounts, made of a durable biomatter, were all that was left a hundredth of a second later as they impacted through the landing bay’s airlock. Several dozen tons of molten steel and biomatter blew into the vast hangar bay, vaporising human flesh, cutting into fuel lines, igniting ammunition, and ripping open the hundred and three fighters being readied for launch.

  The entire bay exploded in a white-hot fireball of destruction.

  In anguish, Grand Admiral Bola Kuolor watched the flickering two dimensional image on the tactical display. All holographic displays were now offline, as was primary shielding, the port launch deck, and the Capital Alcubierre-Sel’varis Drive. The Ballog II had survived two more torpedo hits and was crippled, barely able to make twenty percent speed.

  The offensive strike waves had simply disappeared into the heart of the enemy fleet. He knew some successes were made, with more than a dozen enemy cruisers gone. But their capital ships were still intact, as was the Combine Mothership itself.

  The Mothership was easily the largest vessel Kuolor had ever seen, and it terrified him. As much a mobile planet as a ship, its weapons were of incredible destructive power, putting even those of the Empyreal Sun to shame. According to Lorelei Chen, who had encountered the ship on multiple occasions before, this ship had the ability to open transdimensional jump bridges, able to travel across realities at the will of its commander, a meandering plague upon existence itself. Integrated into its systems were incomprehensible computers which calculated probabilities forward and backwards in time, in perpetuity, giving its processors an ever changing, evolving map of the multiverse. It was capable of housing so-called ‘Asterites’, immense planet-devastating entities, giving the Combine incredible logistical superiority. It was so massive that it was, according to their sensor readings, actually disrupting the gravitational tides of the entire Sol System.

  Whether any of the Terran boarding parties had even gotten into the heart of the Combine fleet was merely a guess at this point. The computers handling the hundreds of comm channels aboard the Ballog II were down, as was the signal link to Earth. His guess was that they were all dead.

  The enemy offensive had brought the forces of the Terran Alliance to an absolute standstill. Not twenty ships out of the hundreds that had gone forth to defend humanity had survived. Two more of Kuolor’s capitals were gone, the surviving three damaged, with the Primax threatening to blow from internal fires – and there were still close to several thousand enemy fighters left along with a hundred larger ships.

  But what was worse, far worse, was the cruiser squadron that at the opening of the action had flanked far out to port by more than five million clicks and was now plunging straight in towards Earth, scoops closed and up to flank speed. Not even his fastest ships could close with them now. The light picket line of a cruiser section, Earth orbital defences and moon ground based defences and a handful of obsolete frigates would have to stop them. It had been assumed that at least one section of enemy ships or more would go for a straight breakthrough under the screen of the fleet-to-fleet action, but without the Array, Earth was on its own now.

  He looked back at the screen. “Order the fleet to retreat,” he hesitated. “The battle is over.”

  AD 2498 (202 ND)

  Light.

  An intense light pierced the air around her, coming from everywhere. It was a majestic light, like the first light of the universe, stabbing through the walls of reality. Lora was one with it, a part of it, a measure of the light’s blinding intensity.

  I AM.

  When she emerged from the intense light, she saw that she was on a ship, a capital ship. Yes, she recognised it well – for it was the main bridge of the Empyreal Sun flagship Retribution. A brilliant beam of pure force exploded outwards as she manifested, bursting in an erupting geyser of light. Particles of energy flew outward onto the only human bystander – Lorelei Chen’s own past, living self, moments before her very first time jump.

  The younger Chen’s skin tingled electrically where the li
ght sparks struck her. Blinded by the raw beauty of the Heavenly visage, she shielded her eyes with her arm and recoiled back against the wall where she lay. The dead body of Machiko Fặmasika – and the Xeilig Ark – lay beside her.

  With no hesitation, the angelic figure of the Ascended Lora moved straight toward the Eidolon, who stood in the crew pit below, commanding an impossible cosmic Storm, masquerading as the dark figure of Lord Damarus in human form.

  This was ten years ago…

  The figure of Lord Damarus turned, distracted, and saw the woman in the light.

  “You,” he hissed.

  At the same time, Lora knew, through the Power of the All, that the Eidolon itself was speaking to her now. As an equal. ‘Lord Damarus’ was no more – that façade had been dropped, the veil fallen.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” the Eidolon said. “You don’t have the power to stop me.”

  Lora stared back at him with a neutral expression. “But I do,” she said. She had the Power of the All now; she could do anything she wanted.

  The Eidolon seemed to chuckle a little nervously. “You can’t kill me either.”

  Maybe he was right. They both possessed the Power of the All. But she certainly had the upper hand here, if what Cris had told her was true. “I can fight you,” she said.

  “Well, you can’t win.”

  “It won’t matter,” she said. “You won’t be able to do anything but fight me back.”

  The Eidolon sneered. “What are you going to do?”

  Lora started to walk toward him. Everything had been building up to this moment. The fate of the multiverse hinged on this fixed point in time, and always had. “Something I should have done a long time ago,” she muttered.

  “Oh, no,” the Eidolon roared, sensing her intent through the All itself. “No. No! Nooo!”

  He raised his human hands to try to stop her. Lora seemed to dissolve, losing her corporeal form, into pure Light. As it reached him, the Eidolon too morphed into white Light, his ‘Damarus’ human host body falling to the ground, dead. The two Lights merged, and then rose up through the ceiling of the bridge deck, flying away, through time, space and dimension.

  Whirling. Further and further away.

  The battle encompassed all of creation, beyond imagination. A titanic struggle between two opposing godlike entities, one representing the good and the other representing chaos.

  Locked in eternal battle.

  Cosmos Infinitude.

  23

  AD 2505 (209 ND)

  When the sensation of the Eidolon’s destruction reached the Combine Swarm in Earth orbit, it sent a shockwave like a mental avalanche through the Dyàus Pítah. As she sat in her hive chamber aboard the Mothership’s battle bridge, the pulsing, agonising feeling hammered Kimberley Stefánsson’s temples with an electromagnetic shriek, blasting her very soul. Like a blaring pain transmitted across the multiverse, she felt the Eidolon die, and with it, a part of herself. Her Power, and her connection to the All, was severed at that moment, and severed from the Combine, like a rug being pulled out from under their feet.

  The sensation caused her hive chamber’s organic shell to shimmer, as it too felt the pain. The exoskeletal material that made up the chamber walls began to resonate in response.

  Around her, on the battle bridge, golems reacted with frenzy as the signal triggered some instinctive memory deep inside them. The monstrous Cephlacks reared up, hissing and slashing with their claws, their pointed spines extruded, ready to fire a rain of deadly darts at any creature they perceived as an enemy.

  Every creature went wild, streaming about and attacking each other, tearing themselves to shreds. The Eidolon’s death pounded in Kimberley’s head, but she gritted her teeth and imposed order upon her mind. With all of the power she had left, she reached out and attempted to control the instincts of her Swarm. She needed to stop them from killing each other, to restore control.

  The Eidolon’s death had left an empty void which the entire Combine Swarm could sense. The pain continued, relentless. From the deepest recesses of the Mothership, she could hear the vibrating bellows of a Gonarch beast as it roared its confusion and fear. She calmed the mammoth-sized monster, then moved on to other minions that were causing too much destruction. With an iron hand, she forced discipline upon her Swarm again.

  Finally the pulsing signal-scream stopped. Blessed, frightening silence fell like an avalanche onto the ship. Kimberley drew a deep breath, letting her biological systems settle, feeling the Swarm return to a normal, but still agitated, state. Then she began to think.

  And she realised, with a start – she had her own mind again. Somehow, deep within her mutated body her human mind had survived intact, and now, without the presence of the Eidolon, she was thinking clearly for the first time in what seemed like forever.

  I am Kimberley Stefánsson…

  She still maintained the psychic connection to the Swarm. Though she used much of her mind to keep watch on the restless race of the Combine – billions upon billions of creatures – she let part of her thoughts ponder what she had just experienced.

  The Eidolon was dead.

  Had Lora succeeded in her personal quest to destroy it? It seemed likely.

  Kimberley smiled. Yes. This was what she wanted. What would happen to her now, though, she wondered? She was no longer human. She was a monster now, part of this Combine Swarm. Her mind was intact, but her body was changed beyond all recognition. She could not go back to the human world. She also knew that the Combine would not be able to succeed with their plans without the Power of the All to guide them. The Overmind was not strong enough for that, she knew, and it would probably order her execution before long. It would blame her for the Combine’s failure…

  Her thoughts turned to the battle raging outside. To the thousands of people dying at her command…

  No!

  This cannot be allowed to continue!

  Finally reaching a decision, Kimberley summoned all of her strength, sending out another signal into the collective consciousness of the Swarm. She had a new mission for the fleet at her control.

  “Stop the attack,” she commanded. “Prepare for immediate transdimensional jump. We have a new target.”

  Within moments, the entire fleet had assembled, with all its Overlords, Gonarchs, Cephlacks, Golems, Motobugs and Drones – with all fighters and support craft moving into formation with the Mothership. The loss of the Eidolon had left them disorientated, confused, and unwilling to question her orders.

  Kimberley, taking advantage of this, activated the dimensional jump with a single command, moving the entire Swarm from the smoking ruins of Earth’s orbital defence forces and into the rift.

  In an instant, they were gone.

  Warmaster Naael Itsyamin, in spite of his exhaustion, forced a smile as the shuttle craft door swung open. He walked forward, extending his hand in salute as Grand Admiral Bola Kuolor, followed by several Paladins and other military officers stepped down.

  Kuolor hesitated ever so briefly and then returned the salute.

  “Damn it all, Kuolor, thank you,” the Warmaster said.

  “I’m rather surprised myself that we survived this one,” the Grand Admiral told him. “Our losses were many. If the Combine had not retreated, none of us would be standing here right now.”

  Itsyamin looked at the group and though he was afraid to ask he had to. “Mobit Akhragan?”

  Naren Yidrath, one of the few remaining Paladins, shook his head.

  Itsyamin sighed. “A terrible day, for us all.” He hesitated and then finally asked, “Cavez?”

  “Missing in action,” Kuolor said quietly. “He might still turn up, sir.”

  Itsyamin nodded, unable to reply.

  Yidrath looked around at the smoke-filled landing platform, and the Laputan mountains beyond. Fires raged on the horizon. “Looks like it was kind of rough here, too.”

  Itsyamin couldn’t even reply. There had been extensive
damage to the infrastructure of several major cities, and Emnoute had been wiped off the map. The casualties, he didn’t even want to think about that. At least the Silver City had been spared, for the most part, though it seemed at the moment to be an almost selfish thing to think about.

  Itsyamin led his guests down to his office and without even asking, pulled out a bottle of single malt Scotch, six tumblers and poured out six very stiff drinks, draining the bottle dry.

  “To our comrades,” he said quietly, and they silently drank the toast.

  Itsyamin settled back in his chair and looked around. “If this is victory,” he finally said, “I sure as hell would hate to see defeat.”

  “The Combine is gone,” Yidrath said. “Let us just be thankful for that.”

  The elderly Warmaster nodded, fighting an exhaustion that had all but robbed him of any ability to do anything beyond sitting in silence and staring.

  “Indeed,” Kuolor said, and lifted his glass in a salute. “To the Terran Alliance Fleet,” he said.

  “And to comrades gone,” the Paladin replied softly.

  The door opened then, and in marched a four-year-old boy, Warmaster Itsyamin’s great-grandchild.

  “Anton,” Itsyamin said, happy but confused to see the young boy. “What are you doing here? I thought I had told you to stay in the room?”

  The child smiled weakly, and then saw his great-grandfather kneeling by his side. “Did we win?” he whispered gently.

  Warmaster Naael Itsyamin nodded then, no longer able to fight back the tears. “Yes, son, we won.”