The Complete New Dominion Trilogy

by Drury, Matthew J.

  “What is that?” Cris asked.

  Kim’s expression was unchanged and emotionless as she stared at him. “Don’t you know?”

  “I… I mean I…”

  “Those who seek oneness with the paramātmā are all that they seek.”

  He looked at the horizon, but couldn’t see anything through the all-pervading brightness. “It’s the Source, isn’t it?” he muttered. He could feel the pulse of his heart quickening. “The Source of the Light. But what is it? I need to understand.”

  Kimberley looked up at him, frowning now. Her head tilted to one side, as if she were examining him. “What’s wrong, daddy?”

  He blinked. “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s right, in fact. I love you, baby. I’m with you now.”

  “No. There’s something wrong,” Kim insisted. “You carry a burden. An attachment to corporeal existence.”

  He swallowed, growing uncomfortable. “I…”

  “A woman,” Kim continued, as if reading his mind. “Lora.”

  “Lora?” He shook his head. “No. No, you’re wrong there, honey. She means nothing to me. I’m with you now, and mommy… just like it used to be.”

  “Your heart says otherwise, daddy. You carry strong feelings for her… and you don’t want to lose her. You must renounce such feelings to achieve oneness with the paramātmā.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  “Words cannot express such things… speech cannot convey the ineffable truth. Swayed by words one is lost. One cannot carry corporeal attachments, the darkness within you, on the great path.”

  He shook his head, more confused than ever now. “I can’t help how I feel about people…”

  “You cannot start this journey with it inside you. When the mind is freed, the body is no longer required. I sense you are not ready to make your Ascension.”

  “But I am ready! This is what I want!” he said, raising his voice.

  “You aren’t ready, daddy,” she said, remaining calm. “You shouldn’t be here. I must send you back now.”

  “Send me back?” he blurted, growing desperate. “No! You can’t do that! I went through so much just to get here! I can’t leave now.”

  “The decision is made,” Kim said.

  “I’m your father!” he yelled.

  She ignored his outburst. “You must go back. Only those who are truly ready may enter the Great Beyond.” She lifted a hand toward him.

  He felt himself tumbling down, falling off and away. “Wait!” he cried. “No!”

  He closed his eyes, shaking his head violently in denial, as he plummeted back to the physical world.

  27

  Hot, searing blast beat down against him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night, wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder blackness. Slowly his vision stabilised, and he found himself in the cube chamber of the alien city on Deadworld, looking down at the motionless visage of his own dead body, which lay sprawled before him across the ancient stone floor, its eyes staring blankly back at him.

  Sightless.

  Dead.

  How…?

  He could hear himself breathing. It came hard, and harsh, and in a shock instant he realised... he didn’t have lungs anymore.

  “My Lord? Is that you? Can you hear me?”

  The sound was strange, distorted. He couldn’t hear it in the way he once did. His vision, too, seemed warped; light and shadow danced together into a hideous simulacrum of the world around him. Or perhaps the simulacrum was perfect, and it was the world around him that was hideous…

  Then the realisation hit him – he had no physical body. No eyes, no ears… no face. His body lay dead before him. Instead, he appeared as a vast, swirling, shapeless mass, an abomination, a phantom...

  “My Lord?”

  It was Sai’bot’s voice. Damarus turned, and saw the Sirkharin cowering behind a support pillar, a look of absolute terror in his bloody, hideous eyes.

  “Do not be afraid,” Damarus said, his voice cacophonously flanged, deep and frightening. “Come here, and kneel before your Holy Master.”

  Sai’bot emerged slowly, recoiling from the ghostly, unnatural appearance of Damarus, who, at length, resembled some kind of warped, anomalous tear in the fabric of space-time itself. “My… My Lord?” he muttered. “What happened to you? You became catatonic, unresponsive… then appeared to fall down dead…”

  Damarus raged against an invisible force field that seemed to be keeping his energy – indeed his very essence – locked in place, unable to break free as he desired. It was like a prison, locking him in a half-ascended, half-corporeal form. Why had his daughter forsaken him? Why had she done this? For a moment he wondered if this was how the Eidolon must have felt for those countless millennia, trapped as he had been in this ancient city…

  The Eidolon…

  It suddenly occurred to him that the Eidolon was gone. He no longer felt the presence of the long-dead spirit. Damn him! Had he used Damarus to break free of his own prison? Had he now abandoned Damarus to this cursed fate?

  No, wait…

  And then, in one blazing, hate-filled moment, Damarus finally understood…

  There was no Eidolon. There was only him. Only Damarus.

  It was all him. Is him. Only him.

  No!

  And he raged and screamed and reached through the Power of the All with all his tormented hatred to crush the Eidolon that had done this to him – but it was no use. It was too late now.

  I am the Eidolon…

  In all his world-destroying fury, his mind soured beyond all recognition. He could not turn back now, and neither did he want to.

  “I have outgrown the need for my physical body,” he said, staring down at the corpse of Cristian Stefánsson laying on the cold stonework before him. He knew he should have felt horrified at the sight of his own dead body – but somehow, he was indifferent, no longer attached to his former life. Everything he associated with that life now seemed distant, and gone. “I have been reborn. Sent back to the world by the very Source of the Light.” He became aware of Sai’bot’s growing fear then, the absolute terror felt by the Sirkharin upon gazing at his hideous, abominable visage. “Fear me not, Sai’bot,” he said. “Instead, fear the darkness that would conceal the true knowledge of the universe from you. Believe in the truth of all things, as I will show you, and you too may find the path to enlightenment.”

  “I believe in you wholeheartedly, my Lord,” Sai’bot said. “But how are we going to escape this planet without your ship, the Thunder?”

  Damarus already knew the answer. Determined, he looked up at the huge black cube that hovered in the air in the centre of the chamber, and smiled inwardly. “We will use the cube,” he said simply.

  Sai’bot bowed. “Very good, my Lord. It is a vessel, then?”

  Damarus chuckled to himself, amazed at the knowledge that flowed through his mind now. It was as though his partial ascension had given him access to all the hidden secrets of the universe. He felt powerful, immeasurably so. A supernova of stars, in a whisper, was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg – he was now capable of so much more. “Indeed, Sai’bot,” he said. His voice sounded like a whole chorus of whispered echoes and seemed to issue from every part of the chamber around them. “I’m sure it could be described as such. Though in its native Xeilig this was known as an Yx’orta Cube.”

  “Lead the way, O Great One.”

  They approached the cube via a thinly-cut sandstone platform extending from an adjacent chamber, and when they reached the glistening side of the object, a series of thumps, squelches and sighing noises issued from within. Finally, a doorway rolled open to the side, allowing them access. They entered a small, membranous cabin of great complexity, filled with long, obsidian tubes stretching along the curved walls. As if sensing their proximity, another set of rooms opened up whi
ch seemed to have been designed for humanoid habitation. They continued through without stopping, until they reached the very centre of the cube: a simple spherical chamber, perhaps ten metres in diameter, with a transparent roof. Three large elliptical windows showed an artificial view of extensive gardens, huge lakes and distant pluming volcanoes. Bizarre alien creatures moved about on the edge of a great forest, in a confusing mêlée of colour and sound.

  “Beautiful,” Sai’bot observed. “Absolutely amazing.”

  Damarus whispered a command, and a hidden mechanism in the vast walls of the stone chamber surrounding the cube activated, a large panel of ancient rock directly overhead sliding back with an immense force and release of pressure, revealing the salmon-pink sky far above. The cube moved upward smoothly, instantaneously, the motion barely noticeable, accelerating upwards into the sky.

  “Destiny awaits us,” Damarus whispered, giddy with victory.

  Sai’bot looked up through the roof as they passed out of the planet’s atmosphere, at the vast blackness of space beyond, blanketed with tiny stars in every conceivable direction. The cube picked up speed, hurtling toward Heaven’s Gate.

  Three-hundred-and-seventy-seven-thousand kilometres ahead of the Yx’orta Cube, Heaven’s Gate opened, the surrounding starfield swallowed up in the swathe of warping light emitted from the wormhole’s mouth. The cube’s comparatively tiny exterior glistened blue in the light, reflecting photons emitted by the dense clouds that swirled around the wormhole’s aperture, giving the phenomenon a mystical yet glorious appearance.

  “And so this is the moment,” Damarus said triumphantly, “where I will travel back through time, over three centuries, to meet the grand destiny that awaits me.”

  “If it is the will of the gods,” Sai’bot said, “then let it be so.”

  Damarus seemed to revel in his own power. “I will usher in a new age for humanity. As a Prophet of God, I will lead them from the darkness of death… into the Light!”

  The Yx’orta Cube hurled toward the open mouth of the wormhole, picking up speed as a hue of rainbow light stabbed toward it.

  “Hail to the Lord!” Sai’bot said fervently. “Hail Damarus!”

  In a sinister tone, Damarus roared, “Yes! Those who are prideful and refuse to bow down, shall be laid low and made into dust!”

  The cube vanished into the swirling Light…

  Light.

  A series of hypnotic dream images floating up from his subconscious; undulating figures which float toward him and pass…

  Liquid faces… amorphous figures… images of his wife and daughter, and Lora… in semi-transparent ghostly shapes… aging and regressing.

  An image of himself running toward himself…

  … underwater looking up at a sunlight-dappled surface… gently waving strands of reeds at an abstract shoreline…

  … disembodied voices, sounds and music.

  A hypnotic, out-of-body effect.

  And then...

  Light…

  ACT THREE - OUROBOROS

  28

  The peacefulness of space was broken. Several huge Nommos ships, more than six kilometres in length, suddenly materialised at the far reaches of the Sol system. They looked like vast biomechanical skeletons floating in space, with dark, egg-like bumps all over them. The bumps began to move, to float away from the titanic skeletons that had carried them from Sirius B across the far reaches of space. Bright lights began to erupt from the bumps and they started to move in formation, slowly, like a swarm of mighty insects, toward the planet Earth.

  Alarm klaxons went off, waking up the entire squadron. People were scrambling around, getting out of bed, getting suited up into their Rãvier units, running from the sleeping pods to their fighters. The Ballog had arrived at Laputa, that much was certain.

  Isamu Arterius threw himself out of bed at the sound of the alarms, and subconsciously wiped the sleep sand from his eyes while they adjusted themselves to the bright, artificial light of the ship. He grabbed his Rãvier unit and thrust it to his bare chest as fast as he could. Once the oil-like substance had snaked around his athletic form and solidified, he ran in the direction of the hangar bay, barely pausing for breath.

  By the time he had reached the hangar, his senses were on full alert; thanks to the few hours’ sleep his mind felt rested and pumped up for the battle ahead. He mounted the ladder to the cockpit of his LC-23 Hornet aerospace fighter with a surge of adrenaline coursing through his veins. He’d been in combat before, of course, taking down criminal organisations operating outside the jurisdiction of the twelve factions, but he never dreamed that he would ever be taking part in a proper military coup like this one, the very goal of which was to overthrow Lord Damarus himself and take control of the Silver City. It was unheard of. He felt a mixture of excitement, fear and anticipation as the moment of truth neared.

  It would be okay once they were out there, and fighting, he told himself. The action would overwhelm their senses, and the will to stay alive would kick in, making it impossible to think about anything else. It was this moment beforehand that always made Arterius uneasy: when doubts started to creep in, when he started to wonder whether he was going to live through the next few hours, whether he would ever live to see the birth of his child. He didn’t want to die. He was only twenty-nine.

  Forget it, he told himself. Just get the job done, then get home. Settling himself in the cockpit, he whispered a command to his Rãvier suit, which had been specially customised to help him cope with the extreme g’s he would pull in his Hornet. Connective, membranous tissues began to snake out from the main body of the suit, plugging into all the relevant ports on his fighter’s computer; together, the Rãvier and the Hornet would act as one, a complex symbiosis with him at the centre, allowing him to pilot the fighter by his thoughts alone. He had performed this complex dance so often in his short military career that it took him less than thirty seconds to have all the connections in place and locked. He pulled on and locked his flight helmet to the shoulders of his Rãvier, and took a deep breath.

  All locked in and ready to go, Arterius began to issue commands to the Hornet, readying its deadly weapons to kill Laputan fighters. As he did so he wrapped his hands around the red bar of the reactor switch and pulled it back, locking it in place. The cockpit temperature rose a degree or two as massive amounts of heat were generated by the fusion reaction happening only a few metres away from him. Biomechanical lights flickered on as power was sent to them. The biological computer began running self-diagnostics to make sure everything was in order.

  The soft and synthesised voice of the computer spoke through his helmet speakers: “Hornet 472055 online. Proceed with voice identification.”

  “Isamu Arterius.”

  “Voiceprint pattern match obtained. Working…”

  Arterius was always a little nervous when starting up his Hornet. He never wanted to have to deal with the embarrassment of getting stuck in his own fighter if he accidentally tripped the anti-intruder programming. But today was different; never before had he ever imagined he’d actually be fighting against the elite pilots of the First Faction. The Silver City was home to some of the best and most experienced pilots in the Terran Alliance, and the idea of going up against them was more than a little unnerving.

  “Complete initiation sequence.”

  “The phoenix burns bright, and it’s enemies burn brighter. I am the phoenix.”

  “Affirmative. Welcome aboard, Isamu Arterius.”

  Power was fed to the weapons systems, bringing them online. Data began to scroll across the secondary monitors as sensors came online. A targeting Heads-Up Display also made its appearance between him and the view port. It showed a 360-degree view of his surroundings and a 160-degree forward firing arc. Arterius switched on his communicator, already locked into the squadron’s scrambled channel.

  “This is Phoenix Three, reporting all-systems-go.”

  The rest of Phoenix Feather squadron followed so
on after, with four more all-systems-go reports. The last to make an appearance on the channel was Kuro Motoshita, the squadron leader.

  “This is Phoenix One to all Feathers. Move to launch position and prepare for immediate launch. We’re coming up on the Malevolence, and we’ve got a lot of enemy fighters out there that need removing. Our orders are to provide cover while the ground forces get mobilised, then draw the enemy fighters away from the capital ships. We’ll be outnumbered, but Nommos reinforcements should arrive within the hour.”

  Magnetic clamps were released, and the six Hornets of Phoenix Feather squadron made their way to their launch positions at the lip of the hangar bay’s external shield. The LC-23 Hornet was shaped like a wasp (hence the name) with an anteriorly rounded aft section; thick armour plating and bulky fusion engines made it one of the most advanced fighter craft ever designed by scientists of the Seventh Faction. Each wingtip housed a Gatling Pulse Laser, a rapid fire multi-barrelled energy weapon that could deliver a steady stream of damage. But would it be enough against the might of Laputan fighters?

  Finally, the all clear was given, and the external shield was lowered. Three by three the fighters were launched in quick succession, Phoenix Feather squadron in the lead. Within fifteen minutes, all 454 aerospace fighters of the Resistance Movement had launched from the belly of the flying battleship Ballog, and were now in flight and moving to intercept the cloud of enemy fighters swarming toward them from their own capital ship, the Malevolence.

  Bursts of flak erupted in Arterius’ path. He roared, plunging the Hornet through the swarms of shrapnel and sizzling nets of particle beams, twisting around multiple explosions that flashed in all directions. The looming spectre of the floating island of Laputa hovered on the horizon, still some distance away, but close.

  “Phoenix One to Phoenix Feather Squadron,” Motoshita barked over the communicator. “Don’t let the Malevolence lock you in its crosshairs or it’s goodbye pilot. Move fast and make your shots count. Good luck, people.”