The Complete New Dominion Trilogy

by Drury, Matthew J.

  Light.

  Bright white light, everywhere.

  Lorelei Chen, somewhat frightened and bewildered, looked around trying to get her bearings. “Hello?” she called. “Is anyone here?”

  She heard the magnified sound of her own heartbeat and breathing. Then the sound of a voice, softly whispering her name in the wind.

  “Cris? Is that you?”

  “Lora.”

  She turned to see Cristian Stefánsson, standing behind her. The moment she saw her lover, she rushed into his arms. “Cris!” she exhaled. “I can’t remember what happened. I was so worried...” She looked around at the whiteness surrounding them, and blinked rapidly. “Where are we?”

  “The Realm of Acmon,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Are we home now?”

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  She smiled. “Is this Heaven?”

  “It’s difficult to explain,” he said. “It isn’t linear…”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Everything. Our lives… our destinies. Time itself. You saved us both, Lora, but time doesn’t exist here. Where we’re going, none of it will matter.”

  Lora found reassurance in his eyes. “I’m ready,” she whispered.

  Cris took her in his arms and kissed her. “I know,” he said.

  And as they held each other tightly, everything filled with Light.

  AD 2130

  Aboard the Combine Mothership, Kimberley Stefánsson sat staring at the main viewer’s display of the monstrous asteroid directly ahead. It was more than a mile in diameter and had a mass of more than forty-thousand megatons – a gnarly, lumbering beast which was on a direct collision course with planet Earth.

  The Apo’calupsis…

  “Take us directly into the asteroid,” Kim shouted, glancing over her shoulder at Tsathoggua’s sculpted, angular face and intense, yellow eyes. Without a word, the pilot golems complied, putting the fleet directly between Earth and Asteroid 2007 VK184.

  Kim harboured no false hopes about her chances of surviving this stunt. Such a death would be supremely honourable, and she did not fear it; indeed, she would embrace such a fate, for she had decided some time ago – since regaining her human mind – that she would indeed die rather than submit to the crime against freedom that was the Combine Swarm. And perhaps this would make up for the thousands, millions, who had already died by her hand. If she could avert this great disaster, she could save so many more.

  But her secret fear was that she would die and the Combine would be undefeated – and go on to infest more worlds in this galaxy like they had always done, since the beginning of time, throughout the multiverse.

  The Overmind, she thought; it was unfair that the Overmind was not here to see this personally, to see how radically she was turning against her commands; indeed, her very nature. But she knew it would already be aware of her transgression. There was nothing the Overmind could do to stop her. She also knew that without the Mothership and the rest of the fleet, the Overmind would be castrated, robbed of its ability to make quick strikes on planets at the whim of its own desires…

  All this Kim considered as the Combine Mothership sailed in a swift arc, causing the sight on the main viewer to shift. The asteroid lay dead ahead now, so close it was drawn to the gravitational pull of the ship.

  And even as the asteroid’s debris went hurtling past, Kim kept her gaze fixed on the holographic screen for another curiously timeless instant.

  The sight made her bare her teeth and roar, “Hold course!”

  She paused the length of a single breath, no more. “Today, things change.”

  She sought Tsathoggua’s gaze, and found an unflinching determination there that filled her with pride. She knew he was feeling the same as her, connected to her thoughts through the hive mind. Her humanity was infecting the Swarm. “Ramming speed!”

  The Mothership’s interior began to glow, to flash, from a series of internal explosions. Tears began to form in Kimberley Stefánsson’s eyes. In a blessed beat, the ship’s hull glowed white and seemed to expand slightly, then burst into a trillion whirling fragments, engulfing the entire fleet.

  Asteroid 2007 VK184 rocked briefly from the shockwave that followed, then fell into several large fragments. Each piece was blasted away by the considerable impact, swirling through the blackness onto new paths, new trajectories.

  Several years later, Earth would experience nothing more than an impressive meteor shower, blissfully unaware of the fate it had narrowly avoided…

  EPILOGOS

  NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT

  AD 2012

  Alexis Stefánsson wiped a tear from her eye as she watched her husband’s coffin being lowered into the dirt. She bent low and lightly kissed Kimberley on the cheek, whispering I love you into her ear. Kim’s gaze was lowered, unable to bring herself to watch her father’s final journey.

  A large crowd had gathered here to pay their last respects to Cris, many old faces that Alexis recognised well: family members, old school and university friends, work colleagues – some had flown all the way from abroad to be here.

  As the grave was filled in, Alexis felt the finality of it all hitting her, like a punch to the chest. She went and paid her last respects, tears streaming down her face, throwing a flower down, wishing that things could have been different.

  The damn cancer, she thought. Oh, Cristian, if only you had survived the cryogenic freezing process. She looked up at the sky again then, silently promising Cris that she would see him again in Heaven, before moving off to join the others.

  Her friend Ruth put a sympathetic arm around her, holding her close, and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “I’m so sorry, Lex,” she said. “If you ever need anything, I’m here for you.” Then she looked at young Kimberley, whose midnight-blue eyes blinked with tragic innocence.

  “She has her father’s eyes,” Ruth said.

  Alexis smiled. “Yes, she does. In a way, I suppose Cris will always live on, through our little girl.”

  “He will,” Ruth nodded. “And she will make you proud.”

  Alexis took a deep breath. Her friend was right. Cristian Stefánsson would always live on, both in her memories, and through their child.

  “You’ve been through so much these past few years,” Ruth said. “With your mother, and now Cris. I guess you’re through, huh?”

  Alexis nodded glumly. “Finished.”

  “It’s too bad he didn’t survive the cryogenics process,” Ruth remarked. “But then, what kind of a world would he have woken up to? There’s no way of knowing for sure.”

  Alexis nodded. It was a rhetorical question of course. How could anyone possibly know?

  As the sun set over the horizon, Alexis sat behind the wheel of the car, face in shadow, eyes staring straight ahead. Kim sat in the back, lost in her own thoughts. Cris was gone, but at least the suffering was over. Living with a terminally-ill cancer patient over the past year had not been pleasant, and now… now they had closure, at least. In what seemed like a harsh irony, Alexis found herself loving life now, more than she ever had before. Not just her life, but Kim’s life, anybody’s life, all life. All she’d wanted were the same answers anybody else would want.

  Where did she come from? Where was she going? How long did she have? All she could do was move on. What she would do next, she still wasn’t sure…

  With that thought, the lights of the Stefánsson family car disappeared into the darkness.

  About the Author

  Matthew J. Drury is a novelist living in Los Angeles County, California. He was born in England and spent much of his early life in Sittingbourne, a Kentish town forty miles south-east of London.

  Matthew lives in California with his wife Marci, and their two children Lois and Jackson.

 

 

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