Dominion Rising: 23 Brand New Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

by White, Gwynn

  “Stay back,” she said, though she did not know if it talked, if it understood her words.

  It didn't stay back. It kept coming, moving a little quicker now, surpassing her pace.

  “I mean it,” she added, and she really did, but she had no threat to back it up. Perhaps she really meant to beg, to plead, to bargain with her life, to offer up the location of Skip and Alex, to promise surrender and servitude. All of those thoughts passed through her mind, as if it too had been clouded in shadow.

  She backed away faster now, two steps, then three. The shadow glided along in pursuit.

  “What do you want?” she asked. A part of her thought that maybe she could reason with it, come to some kind of truce. A bigger part knew that it had no interest in diplomacy. It was here to consume and command. It knew it could not command her, so that left only one option.

  Then suddenly the shadow knitted together into a form like a human, though a shimmering form, with a stray wisp of darkness here and there. Maggie wasn't sure if it really was shadow or smoke, or some gaseous form. She had previously observed the gaseous species known as the Aethera during their last centennial migratory event. This, however, seemed to be able to control its form, to structure it in a way to match the species it encountered.

  “We want peace,” the creature said. Its voice was a booming, wallowing sound, and its form vibrated as it spoke. It was almost like it created the words by shaking its body violently.

  The word peace had an effect on Maggie like the word war had on Skip. She let her guard down. She halted, willing to hear it out, to see what it wanted, to try to understand it, so that maybe, just maybe, they could find a solution.

  The shimmering, now humanoid, figure approached, offering her its hand, which was a vague amalgamation of shadowy fingers, like a sculpture gone wrong.

  “Total peace,” it said, stepping closer, almost within grasp.

  Maggie was about to reach her own gauntleted hand out, when it added: “Through total annihilation.”

  37

  The Longest Flight

  Maggie yanked her hand back in time. The sudden movement caused the shadowy form to burst back out into its more amorphous shape. The force of the burst made the wisps around the edge turn sharp like blades, before they faded into the dark haze.

  Maggie turned and fled. She activated all the boosters in her suit, so she was thrown forward with every racing step. If it weren't for those boosters, the chasing shadow would have likely caught her before she reached the lift.

  She slammed the lift door shut, but the shadow seeped through the cracks beneath. She stomped at it, but the touch was like ice, even through the armour. She hammered her fist at the lift controls, not caring where it brought her, so long as it was away from there. It rose up, slicing through the shadow that had crept inside, leaving little bits of it to shrivel up and fade away.

  She pulled the emergency lever as soon as she got to the next level. She forced open the door, almost tripping as she leapt outside. She looked in both directions, panting, waiting for some other shadow to tear itself from the walls. She saw Skip and Alex running towards her, waving. As soon as they reached her, she grabbed their arms and pulled them with her as she fled.

  “What's wrong?” Skip asked.

  “Don't ask, just run!”

  They had barely turned the next corner before they were faced with the shadowy form, its wispy ends billowing more rapidly than before, as if it was angry. The trio halted.

  “Stars,” Skip said. “Y-y-you see that too, right?”

  “Yes,” Maggie replied.

  Alex nodded, but said nothing.

  Skip's breathing was shallow. “I think that's … I think that's an Umbra.”

  “The Masters,” Maggie said.

  Skip clenched his fists, activating the electro-bludgeon. “They're not my masters.”

  He raced towards the creature, despite Maggie's attempt to stop him. He swung, and the rod buzzed through the air. Then part of the shadow seemed to leap out towards the electricity and swallow it, like some kind of mouth. The entire charge of the weapon was consumed, and Skip was just glad his hand didn't go with it.

  “Right, let's run!” he cried, belting off before the others. It was easier to run like your life depended on it when it really did.

  The Umbra pursued them, seeming to run as much across the walls and ceiling as the floor. Its form was constantly shifting, becoming longer here, thinner there. It bulged in places and seemed to dissipate in others, as if it was losing limbs and growing new ones. It was anyone's guess what was really happening. The history of the Umbra had been occluded with myth. Yet now Skip and Maggie wondered if maybe those tales weren't myths at all.

  Though Skip initially led the way, Maggie quickly took the lead, enhanced by her boosters. She grabbed the others under either arm as she passed, then fired up the boosters again. All three of them were catapulted down the corridor.

  They turned into the next passage, finding a force of Raetuumaka waiting for them, some with guns, some with blades, some with electro-bludgeons. On any other occasion, the trio might have turned and tried to find another way, but they leapt into the arms of the army facing them—not with glee, but with less fear than of that which followed.

  Maggie kept her clutch on Skip and Alex, though she felt them slipping. More than anything, it seemed that the young royal was fighting against her grip. Even Skip, as proud as he was, didn't feign bravado at that moment, but then he had learned long before that the fire well and truly burns. Alex was fresh to the fears that others had long let fester inside them.

  Maggie's voice controls were busted from the earlier Marauder attack, and her hands were more than full. She had to use her elbows to activate the boosters again. The force of them flung the trio right into and through the horde of Raetuumaka ahead, bowling some of them over, while others leapt out of the way. She took a step here and there between each push of the boosters, dancing between the piling bodies of her foe.

  Then she felt Alex slip. She tried to grab him, to hold him tighter, even to yank him along behind her if she could. But he fell. He tumbled into the pile of Raetuumaka, while the boosters continued to throw Maggie and Skip farther down the corridor, halting at the end.

  Then she heard the rat-men scream, and those howls were horrifying. She glanced back, letting go of Skip, thinking Alex had started his slaughter, but saw that the Umbra was passing through the army. It seemed to consume each of the Raetuumaka as it passed, sucking them up into its shadow, then piercing their entire body with what looked like a thousand black needles. Then it gulped them up, seeming to consume them in their entirety. It broke them down into nothing, until all that was left was the shadow.

  Alex sat up, looking about for his weapon. The Raetuumaka cowered and prayed around him. Perhaps they begged for mercy in their tongue, promising to do better, to work harder on the weapons, to do more for the Masters. They were each gobbled up in turn.

  Maggie took a step towards Alex, but Skip grabbed her arm and pulled her back. The distance was greater on this side than on the side of the shadow. Even with the boosters, the Umbra would reach Alex first.

  The teen gasped as he saw the shadow approach, then turned to look at Maggie and Skip. Maggie tried to run forward again, but once more Skip held her back. Then the shadow picked Alex up, and he cried out, before his body was pierced by shadow, and it swallowed him whole.

  “Come on!” Skip shouted, dragging Maggie around the corner. It took a moment for her wits to return, and they returned more than a little frayed. She ran alongside Skip, following the route her sensors displayed. The image flickered on and off as the Umbra pursued. She was now moving on automatic. If the visor wasn't telling her the way, she would have run wherever Skip ran, or she might have run in circles—back to the consuming shadow.

  They bulldozed their way through the fleeing guards. No matter where the patrols where, they had heard the blood-curdling cries of their comrades, a
nd didn't trust in pleading or prayer. The only safety was in running. Skip and Maggie were proof of that.

  They reached the landing bay, where the fighter-bomber waited. Skip's eyes widened at the sight of all the slain guards around the room. Maggie knew he thought she did it, but right now she couldn't bring herself to correct him. She couldn't even mention Alex's name.

  They boarded the ship and Skip took the controls. Maggie pulled off her helmet and collapsed into the seat beside him. She stared at the viewscreen as he started up and pulled out of the hangar. There was no shield up around the Ark. The Raetuumaka saw no threat from space. The real monster was inside their ship.

  38

  Processing

  Skip flew the Bridge away from the Ark, reversing its last flight course, sending it back out into the Unknown. He looked at Maggie every now and then, appearing like he was going to say something, then stopping himself half-way through.

  “You can talk,” she said, when he did it for the tenth time.

  “I was just … I was gonna say.” He stopped himself and sighed. “You did everything you could.”

  Maggie was silent.

  “Sometimes it's the luck of the draw,” Skip said. “You can't save them all.”

  Maybe that was true, and maybe Skip had come to terms with that a long time before. He was a soldier, a general. He led people into battle all the time, knowing well some of them weren't coming back. He even sent some to battle in forces he wasn't allowed to lead personally, deemed too dangerous. The Empire didn't want to risk their celebrity war hero.

  For Maggie, it was different. The only battle she had really fought before was on Omega Prime, which was only a battle because of her endless array of shields. She could have surrendered, but surrender meant death in the Empire. The shields were to ensure the safety of her team. The stalemate helped her secure a deal with the Empire negotiator, to ensure all her people got out in one piece. Sure, some of them would end up out here, or on other God-forsaken research facilities in the middle of nowhere, but at least they were alive. That was the one thing she prided herself on throughout all of this. The preservation of life.

  “It's not your fault,” Skip said.

  She wasn't so sure about that. She brought Alex there, even if she didn't know it. She gave him back his weapon. She used the supposedly unbreakable encryption that the teen was able to hack. And, more than anything, she let him go. Part of her wondered if maybe she did it on purpose, if her old hatred of the royals and everything they stood for manifested in that moment.

  “I hate to say it,” Skip continued, “but … it happens. Stars, it happens all the time. It could've been one of us.”

  “But it wasn't,” Maggie said.

  “You'll get over it,” Skip said with reassuring certainty.

  Or, she thought, maybe she would end up like him, a little cracked.

  “The only thing I'm concerned about,” Skip said, “is how the royals will react.” He paused, staring at the viewscreen. “But then, we might never make it back to the Core Worlds.”

  Maybe that was meant to be reassuring too.

  “You know, we have to go back there,” he said.

  Maggie glanced at him, but said nothing.

  “We have to go back and kill that thing.”

  And, perhaps for the first time in her life, the thought of killing something didn't upset her at all.

  39

  Better Late Than Never

  It took only a minute for Ontri to board the Ark, but it took far longer than originally predicted to find his way around the ship. There was something about Skip's last overclocking request that had damaged his sensors, and also damaged his ability to detect faults. He followed the misleading directions for what seemed like hours, strolling through the vessel largely undetected.

  For the most part, Ontri was left alone, but then he did find himself on parts of the ship that seemed largely deserted. What his sensors had suggested was a vitals signal turned out to be a heat signature from overheating sections of the space barge's vast engine. He hadn't seen an engine quite like it. It seemed to be powered by the same nuclear waste that was being loaded into weapons all across the vessel, and it spanned the entire length of the ship. Indeed, by Ontri's assessment—which might have been a little faulty too—more than half the gigantic size of the barge was made up of the machinery to get it moving. It clearly was designed to travel great distances, though it lacked the speed and efficiency of the Infinite engines. Ontri's conclusion was that these Raetuumaka, whom he had tagged as a scavenging species, should probably scavenge those engines off the Gemini. He wondered if the good Captain would be obliging.

  Ontri wandered back and forth on the lower levels for quite a bit, coming back several times to what evidently appeared to be the same overheated sections of the engine. He made various assessments, ending with pondering if the good Captain would be obliging.

  The loop only ended when it was broken by the intervention of an outside force. One of the Raetuumaka engineers stumbled into Ontri, dropping all his tools in surprise. “Who … what … are you?” it asked in Raetuum. It seemed that they had scavenged so much, including many auts, that it wasn't sure if it was part of the hoard.

  Ontri smiled. He always did like being asked about himself. He assumed it was a very human thing. “I am an invader,” he said pleasantly, almost beaming with pride. He hadn't tried invading before. It was a new skill, and he did very much like learning and implementing new skills.

  The Raetuumak looked dumbfounded. He kept glancing down to his tools.

  “Do you need some help?” Ontri asked, bending down to pick up some of the implements. By the time he straightened up again, the Raetuumak engineer was gone. His assessment of the general air of the creature was: panicked.

  “How very strange,” Ontri told himself. He made a mental note to try running away from someone while they were not looking. He presumed that feeling panicked might be a natural prerequisite to making that work effectively.

  Now that the loop was broken, Ontri started to wander upstairs. He found himself overhearing conversations in the Raetuum tongue, and quickly building a database of the language. He had a more sophisticated version of the auto-translator that all crew members had implanted into their ears. He felt a lot of things made him a little bit human, but he supposed those chips made them a little bit aut.

  Knowing the Raetuum language proved immediately useful, not just for eavesdropping on the guards and thus avoiding most of their patrols, but for reading signs on doors and walls. He followed a lost engineer to a map console, which had the entire layout of the ship. The Raetuumak eyed him suspiciously, but Ontri made a comment in Raetuum about the lovely space weather, which seemed to help.

  Once the console was free, he started to hack the system to access the files found in the ship's protected database. It required some overclocking to achieve this. Something else popped in the process, making one of his eyes blink repeatedly.

  Eventually, he broke through the system defences and started to search the files. He inspected the prisoner data, finding details of many different captives. It seemed that the Raetuumaka didn't just scavenge technology. They took the crew as well. Groups of prisoners were assigned different symbols, many of which Ontri was able to decipher. The one with a man of Skip's description, the only human prisoner they had, was in the Dozen Deaths category. Ontri mused on that for a moment. His rather limited understanding was that one death was usually enough.

  “Block 187-G,” Ontri said aloud, reading the location of Skip's cell. He didn't need to read aloud, but he'd seen many humans do it, and presumed it was a good thing.

  He removed the port connecting him to the console and smiled at a passing Raetuumak engineer. He wasn't aware that he was still constantly winking.

  “Just charging up,” he said in Raetuum.

  “You should report to maintenance.”

  “Why, thank you. I shall.”

  Ontri had seen
humans telling their children it never hurt to have manners, to always use their “p's and t's,” as they put it. He found it all rather enthralling, and found that on most occasions it worked. On others, violence worked wonders.

  His vision went suddenly, then came back. He felt a little different. His damaged fault detection couldn't tell what the problem was, but his “gut,” as humans called it, told him a chip had shut down. He wasn't sure what that chip was, but made a mental note to attend maintenance and request an assessment. If they wouldn't help, he could always kill them.

  Ontri finished processing that task, then turned his attention to the next one: finding the cell and freeing Skip. He used the computer's system to calculate the fastest route, making note of checkpoints along the way.

  Throughout his wandering, which still took longer than predicted, he thought he heard a lot of shouting and gunfire. He presumed it was just another fault in his hardware, and wondered if this was what humans meant by “getting old,” or “dying.” He wondered if he should start processing regrets.

  He arrived on the floor where Skip's cell was located. According to the computer, there should have been a patrol here, but it seemed the guards were sleeping. One of them appeared to be smoking while he slept. Ontri made a tiny note of the potential fire risk.

  He skipped down towards the cell. “Good sir!” he cried. “I've come to rescue you!”

  He reached the bars and saw the gate ajar. He tapped it with one finger, and it swung open. There was not a soul in sight.

  “Oh,” he said.

  40

  Rendezvous

  It took some time for the Bridge to travel back to where the rest of the starship Gemini was parked, still skirting the rim of the galaxy. Skip was hesitant to cross the barrier of the warning signs—not because they were warnings (there were many others he never heeded), but because of the dark feeling in his gut that he had already been out here, that the gap in his memory was matched by the void of the Unknown.