Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Novels from Top Fantasy and Science Fiction Authors

by Gwynn White

  “Acquiring.”

  “Stars, I need it now!”

  It didn't matter that the gunfire could be heard on the comms. Ontri's Emotion Approximation Chip was just a series of algorithms that simulated responses to certain detected situations, based on a variety of parameters. He didn't register the “urgency” of the situation like Maggie might—but he wouldn't say “I told you so” either.

  Yet, Ontri was designed first and foremost to learn. He had learned a variety of phrases that the good Captain would use that boiled down to asking him to overclock himself. “I need it now” was one of them. He ramped up his processor speeds significantly, working through the data more quickly. Something popped as he did this, but it seemed to have zero bearing on the outcome.

  “Acquired,” Ontri droned. “Sending now.”

  Part of the route lit up in the overlay of the ship in Skip's visor, with a blinking red dot where he was, and not a single blinking light behind him. Skip never fully trusted technology, and this was a good reason why. He could still see the blasts of energy in the corners of his eyes and still hear the scamper of rodent feet behind him.

  “Why aren't we picking up vitals?” he asked, taking the next right, then left, then left again. He hammered his fist against a marking on his thigh, which triggered an adrenaline injection. He needed it.

  “They appear to have some kind of vitals dampener,” Ontri explained in his usual matter-of-fact manner.

  “Can you—?”

  “Already on it, sir.”

  Suddenly the visor displayed a lot of other blinking yellow dots behind him. A few of them vanished into the darkness, but it seemed there was always more to fill their places. Skip had been in fights like this before, but usually with bigger guns. Even then, there was always a constant worry: that he'd run out of ammunition before they ran out of bodies.

  “By my estimates,” Ontri said, “the quickest and safest route is to circle around at the next right.” A new route displayed in grey, circling back around to where he came from. “You will lead most of the enemy around the square, but you will face heavy resistance once you cross over old territory.”

  “Yeah, I guessed that.”

  “A suggestion, Captain.”

  “Fire away,” Skip said. He suddenly thought better of that wording. “I mean, go ahead.”

  Ontri's voice came through crackled, then cut off entirely. Then a sudden, sharp pain pierced through Skip's head. He felt like his brain was on fire. The static in his ears increased until it was like the roar of speakers. He stumbled, grasping at his helmet, cringing from the pain.

  He fell, and everything seemed to go black for a moment. When it faded moments later, he saw a furry foot in front of his visor. He glanced up to see a robed rat-man, hunched over like the rest of them, but taller and broader, and leaning on a mechanical staff.

  “You and your weapons,” the figure growled.

  Something ripped the turret from his shoulder. It had long ran out of ammunition.

  “Well,” the figure added, before the stabbing pain began anew. “We have ours.”

  8

  The Wrong Kind of Waiting

  Maggie worked tirelessly to try to override the jam on Skip's signal, but it proved fruitless. Any of the techniques she tried would have worked in normal circumstances, but she knew Skip's reputation more than she knew him: if he wanted to disappear, he'd disappear. He had only returned to the Pan-Galactic Empire a year ago, and she'd heard the whispers that he'd returned changed. They called him the Man of No Tears, the most celebrated man of the Empire, more popular than the Emperor himself. Maggie wondered how many people Skip had left crying.

  “What'll we do?” her Second, Toz Ilgi, asked. Skip had the definition of loyalty in his Second, but Toz was a different sort altogether: a hired hand. He'd worked with Maggie before, back in the days when she ran the Ensemble of Environmentalist Elders, or the EEE. Toz was good at getting into places, though not so good at getting out. He was paying the same penance she was: “galaxy service” aboard the flagship of the Empire. It mightn't have even seemed like a punishment, were it not for Skip. She wasn't quite shackled to him, but her ship was chained to his.

  “Keep probing,” Maggie said. “I need a walk.”

  She left the command room and strolled through the brightly-lit corridors of Gemini Right, putting her bushy, brown hair up into a bobbin as she went. She passed several pod rooms, where double doors sealed in artificial habitats, part of her research work on the vessel (all fuelling the scientific efforts of the Empire). She wasn't given time as a sentence. She was given a goal. Ten monumental discoveries. She had her definition of what “monumental” meant, but the Empire had its own. From the outside of the ship, the pods looked like glass bubbles stuck to the hull, each housing its own unique environment. There was one with snow, one with water, one like a jungle, one like a desert. She didn't need planets. She brought them with her.

  She passed by the medical bay, where three of Skip's soldiers were still being treated for burns from the last “mission,” if it could be called that. People said he was more tactical before his disappearance. It seemed like he was getting more and more reckless by the day. That wouldn't be so bad if the lives of four hundred crew members weren't at stake. There was no medical bay on Gemini Left. Skip had had the old one converted into an armoury. That whole ship was just a drifting array of weapons. Maggie had a feeling that Skip considered his crew to be weapons too.

  She went to Engineering, where Cada Tybar was holed up. She was one of the most gifted mechanics Maggie had ever met. In the three months since the Gemini launched, she had already pushed the Infinite engines beyond known capacity, allowing them to travel farther into space, out to the Edge. Some explorers had been out there before, but they knew they would never make it back. They let capsules with their maps and data gradually drift to the centre of the galaxy, to civilisation, while the pioneers were lost to the unknown. In many ways, Cada was partly to blame for the current mess. Were it not for her work, they wouldn't be out this far. They wouldn't have encountered that space barge.

  “We could dock and board,” Cada said before Maggie had a chance to talk.

  “No. Skip's doing the exploring.”

  “That's madness.”

  “Yeah, but it's probably safer that way.”

  “Not for him.”

  “For us.”

  A light blinked on the data pad on Maggie's left wrist. She tapped it, revealing a small hologram of Toz, looking as trapped as ever. “What's up?” she asked.

  “We've got a problem,” Toz said.

  He transferred a signal to the larger screen in Engineering. Maggie expected to see Skip. Instead, she saw some kind of hybrid of man and rat, leaning heavily on a glowing staff. It didn't look like it glowed from any known light source.

  “We've got your Captain,” the creature said.

  The camera panned down, and there was Skip, bruised, bloodied and dazed. And someone's prisoner. Not like Maggie expected at all.

  9

  The Language Barrier

  Skip was subdued. It wasn't a position he was in often, and not one that suited him. He wasn't just the Man of No Tears—he was the Man Who Didn't Kneel. Yet there was a first time for everything. He was stripped of his armour, with his arms tied behind his back, with the golden curl that so many identified him with now straightened out with sweat. He looked like a wounded man, a broken man. He even looked like that to himself, for he saw his faint reflection in the glass of the camera that was pressed close to his face.

  “I am As-hamaz,” the rat-man sneered. “I am your Captain now. Abandon your posts. Leave your vessel for us. If you do it willingly, we will grant you mercy and let six of you take an escape pod to wherever the galaxy leads you. All others will be slaves to the Raetuumaka.”

  The other rat-men cheered and chanted, speaking some other tongue which Skip's implanted auto-translator didn't recognise. It tried hard to work out the
grammar and syntax, to approximate a translation, but all that came back was “Error. Unrecognised. Attempting deconstruction.” He hadn't yet heard enough of their language for the translator to work on, but he had a feeling he'd be hearing a lot more soon enough.

  “We will comply,” Maggie said. Skip was horrified to hear her surrendering already, but then he wasn't sure what he expected from her. She wasn't a military girl. She didn't understand the concept of “No surrender.” She even led starship rallies throughout key sectors in protest against the Empire's policy of letting troops fight to the last bullet and breath instead of working out some means of peace.

  As-hamaz grinned, showing his sharpened teeth and long, forked tongue, which he waved like a flag of victory. His whiskers twitched with satisfaction. He rested less on his staff, didn't stoop so low, and held his furry chin on high.

  “But,” Maggie added, and it was to Skip like an opening volley. “But you must hand our Captain … I mean, our former Captain … over to us first. I choose him to be one of the six to take the escape pod.”

  Good, Skip thought. Now I see it. The trick.

  As-hamaz saw it too. He snarled and grabbed Skip by the scruff of the neck.

  “He's ours now. For attacking the Raetuumaka, he shall suffer the Dozen Deaths. This is the law of our people. This is the will of the Raetuu. There is no negotiation.”

  “It is our law that our Captain always be the first to take an escape pod,” Maggie lied. In fact, it was the opposite. The Captain was supposed to go down with the ship, not that it always transpired that way. Some were too valuable, either for their expertise or their image—or, in Skip's case, both.

  As-hamaz cut the transmission. Skip wondered what Maggie made of that. It wasn't the first time Skip had seen a transmission cut in such a tense situation. Sometimes he did it himself. It often paid to play hard ball, to seem like it was all or nothing. The problem was knowing just how far you could go before it was nothing at all.

  The rat-man, who might have been some kind of rat-king for all Skip knew, turned to his comrades and spat a series of commands to them in that harsh tongue of theirs. Each new sentence gave Skip's auto-translator something extra to work on, but it still wasn't enough.

  “Maybe I can help,” Skip suggested.

  As-hamaz turned to him and drew in close, close enough that his whiskers tickled Skip's face. He smelt the foul breath and wondered what those creatures ate. He tried not to wonder too deeply.

  “Go on,” As-hamaz said.

  “Maybe I can reason with her.”

  “Reason? No. There are laws to follow. We have ours, and you have yours. You must face the Dozen Deaths, and yet she must make you take the escape pod first. How do we reconcile this? It must be reconciled.”

  “Tell me the name of your law,” Skip said, “in your tongue.”

  As-hamaz squinted his eyes. “Daedel Itkua.”

  “And what would you call me in … you know, whatever it is you speak?”

  “In Raetuum, you are Daedes.”

  “The dead?” Skip guessed.

  “Soon to be,” As-hamaz snarled.

  The rat-man turned back to his associates, rattling off more commands. Skip's auto-translator worked furiously, using the extra words and translation Skip had acquired, until finally it had developed an approximate dictionary of their language, with a basic understanding of their grammar. It constantly updated as they spoke.

  “Destroy their escape pods,” As-hamaz ordered in Raetuum.

  “But then none of them can leave,” another replied.

  “Exactly. Then our laws are reconciled.”

  He turned back to the camera, signalling with his claw. The image of Maggie, more tense than ever, came on. The waves of her bushy, brown hair took up most of the screen, along with her big, blue eyes, wide with apprehension.

  “I think we got off—”

  “We've found a solution,” As-hamaz said with glee.

  Skip saw the rat-men heading to their gun-chambers. He saw in Maggie's face that she would try to negotiate, but there was no negotiation. Already the offer of six people saved was off the table. Everyone would die or become slaves.

  “Good,” Maggie said. “We are happy to reach some kind of compromise.”

  “Retreat!” Skip shouted.

  Maggie's face looked more surprised than ever.

  “It's a lie,” Skip said. “Get out of here, Mags! Full throttle!”

  As-hamaz knocked off the screen and smacked Skip across the mouth.

  He spat blood. “That all ya got?”

  As-hamaz snarled. “I'm saving your lives for the Dozen Deaths. But let's not save them any longer. Let's get started with the first one.”

  10

  A Hard Turn

  Maggie immediately issued a Code Yellow command to both sections of the Gemini, followed swiftly by a video recording of Skip's desperate plea. She had to do this for his troops, because she knew they would never follow her direction otherwise. As demoralising as it was, she needed them to focus on getting away.

  The large fighter-bomber that joined the rear of both rockets, dubbed the Bridge, broke off, controlled by an Automated Auxiliary Android, or AAA, which powered up and left its alcove to take the wheel. The right rocket began to turn, while the left drifted for a moment as the crew there were somewhat panicked by seeing their Captain taken.

  Maggie took the nearest transporter, which brought her straight to the command room. Axel Hoodan was at the wheel, gesturing dramatically over the motion-controlled grid. The rocket turned slowly in response.

  “Get our shields up,” Maggie told her Second.

  Toz was already working on it, but Maggie raced over to one of the tactical stations on either side and started powering up some of the shields herself. There were dozens of them throughout the vessel, all independent from one another, an idea she and Cada came up with in case of a cyber attack or power outage. It was safer that way, but it also took longer to get all those shields online.

  The vessel rocked as a turret on the space barge opened fire. The blasts struck the shields guarding some of the environmental modules, which the attackers must have mistaken for escape pods.

  “We've lost ten percent shields,” Toz said. He manned the other tactical station, rerouting power from the shields on the other side of the vessel.

  “Get us out of here, Axel!” Maggie barked.

  “I'm trying!” Axel moved quicker than before, but nothing could speed up the turning of such a large vessel. He'd given as much power as possible to the thrusters. Anything else would need to come from the shields.

  Another volley hit, rocking the vessel. They gave it their all, stealing power from unessential systems, throwing everything at the thrusters. Axel was a pantomime on stage, arms waving madly, watched only by the stars outside. Everyone else was glued to their respective screens.

  All they could do was turn and try to flee, holding up the shields for as long as they could. They couldn't fire back. There were no weapons on Gemini Right. Everything was on the other side.

  Then a shadow passed over the entire room, and Maggie turned to see the other rocket cruising past. It moved between her vessel and the space barge, with its own turrets turning in place. She could hear the rounds of flak fire as it drifted through. Then she saw the fiery, smoking ruins of the guns on the space barge, and some smaller pockets of smoke trailing behind Gemini Left. It moved faster than her vessel, because no energy was being routed to the shields. Everything was put into the thrusters and weapons.

  Axel relaxed his frantic arms, but the moment of victory was short-lived. No sooner did the crew of her ship smile before it was wiped clean off their faces. Hatches opened up across the space barge, out of which flooded dozens of fighters.

  11

  Against Programming

  Maggie issued the same command to the Offspring, where Ontri sat patiently, completely unfazed by the events that were transpiring. The command triggered a set r
eaction: to follow it to the letter. Yet, when he saw the video footage of Skip's distress, his Emotion Approximation Chip triggered a different reaction: to defy that command. He was torn between the conflicting information, but unlike humans, he immediately calculated a resolution.

  He gently pressed the Auto button on the touchscreen before him, then stood up as the closest AAA aboard the Offspring powered up. A hidden door in the wall opened, revealing an alcove in which the android was stored. Ontri paused and cocked his head as it passed him. He was naturally curious about all beings, but he wondered about auts more than most. He even wondered if he was made to wonder, and if maybe, deep down, on perhaps a microscopic level, the other races had their own kind of wiring and coding too.

  He strolled to the hatch door, naturally adjusting to the shifting of the fighter as the AAA started to steer it off at an angle. Ontri performed a quick scan for life aboard the vessel, a requirement of his Preservation Chip, before opening the door to the vacuum of space. He leapt out, and the force of the space barge's magnetic hull yanked him towards it, until he struck with a clang.

  If he could breathe, he would have taken a deep breath. Then he calculated his next move, faced with the biggest wonder of all: how he would rescue the good Captain Sutridge.

  12

  Death by a Thousand Stings

  The Gemini rockets flew roughly parallel, each one taking over the other a little, both crew desperately trying to align them, while even more desperately trying to escape from the approaching swarm of fighters. The Bridge hovered over both rockets, waiting for the opportune time to clamp into place. The Offspring, on the other hand, lagged behind, trailed by the swarm.

  “Get us out of here!” Maggie shouted.