Dominion (2 page)

What they really needed was a miracle.

T
he ship before them was less mechanical than organic. It was clearly made of some form of alloy, but its form resembled that of a great manta ray freed from the hold of the sea and now swimming through the greater immensity of space: smooth, flowing, elegant—a creature of breathtaking beauty and potential lethality.

The surface of the vessel showed no lights, no windows, and no sign of weapons. It reflected the space around it, so that it seemed a thing composed of darkness and stars. It dwarfed the
Nomad
, and was significantly larger than even the greatest of the Illyri destroyers and carriers that moved back and forth through the wormholes.

About the length of ten or eleven football stadiums laid end to end, Paul Kerr calculated, and half as wide. Even in this desperate situation—tired, hunted, and having committed the
Nomad
to a wormhole from which no ship had ever returned, only to be confronted by an alien craft of unknown origin and intention—he was almost amused to find himself thinking in terms of football fields, although as a source of amusement it was only one step away from hysteria.

For he was terrified: they all were.

And as the majesty and dread of the unknown craft impacted upon them, the crew of the comparatively tiny
Nomad
—as inconsequential as a beetle before a buffalo, a minnow before a whale—found themselves truly lost for words. Perhaps then it was fitting that the first of them to speak was neither Illyri nor human, but biomechanical.

“It's wonderful,” said Alis, and Paul wondered if the Mech had somehow busted a circuit coming through the wormhole. Perhaps it was a case of the mechanical responding to the mechanical, because Alis was an artificial life-form; faced with an engineering marvel like the one that currently dominated their field of view, she might have been more inclined to appreciate its construction than the four humans and one Illyri who stood alongside her, and were instead worried about the distinct possibility of dying. To Paul's left, Meia, the other Mech, remained silent, but her face betrayed graver concern than Alis's.

“Please don't let ‘It's wonderful' be the last words that I hear,” said Thula.

The big Zulu was Paul's sergeant, and it was clear that their thoughts were running along similar lines.

“Maybe they're friendly?” suggested Steven hopefully. He was Paul's younger brother, and was currently occupying the copilot's chair beside Alis. He glanced at Alis as he asked the question, but his girlfriend—if that was the appropriate term for a biomechanical organism at least twice his age, thought Paul—was too in awe of the ship even to hear the question.

“Activity,” said Meia. “Starboard wing of the vessel. It's firing something.”

Paul saw it seconds after Meia. A hatch had opened in the alien ship, and now an object was approaching at speed.

“Ah hell,” said Thula.

“What is it?” asked Paul. “A torpedo?”

“Our systems can't identify it,” said Alis.

“Come on, Alis! I don't want to find out its purpose only when it blows us to pieces.”

“I'm trying!” said Alis.

“I can target it and take it out,” said Rizzo, the fourth human on board the
Nomad
. “But our weapons are almost exhausted. If we end up in a fight, we may be reduced to throwing our shoes at them.”

“Lock on to it,” said Paul. “On my command—”

“No.”

They all looked to the owner of the voice, even Alis.

Syl Hellais stepped forward, and Paul felt his skin prickle as she brushed against him. She was no longer the Syl with whom he had fallen in love on Earth, the Illyri girl struggling through the Highlands, hunted by her own people and surrounded by the hostile faces of the human Resistance who fought the Illyri occupation. Back then she had been dependent on Paul to keep her safe, or so he had believed. But in the time that they had been apart—Paul conscripted to the Brigades with his brother, Syl a virtual prisoner of the Nairene Sisterhood on the Marque with her friend Ani—she had become a being transformed, a creature who was both Syl and Not-Syl. She had powers beyond Paul's comprehension. She could bend others to her will, cloud their minds, even kill them, all without the slightest physical contact. Paul had watched her do it, and he realized to his horror that he was now slightly afraid of this female creature for whom he also felt so much love. He had no idea how long she had kept this secret hidden, and he wondered how much else she might be hiding from him. He had to be able to trust her, for the sake of his crew as much as for himself.

For if he could not trust her, neither could he love her.

“Syl!” he snapped, frustrated.

“Don't do anything,” she said, then, as an afterthought, she added, “please.”

“We can't just sit here and let it come.”

“We must,” she said.

She wasn't even looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on the ship.

“Why?”

But Syl had blocked him out. All of her attention and energy were directed at the vessel before them. She allowed her mind to drift, passing through the hull of the
Nomad
and out into the depths of space. She shivered for a moment. Paul saw it and reached out for her in concern, but thought better of touching her when a blue crackle of static electricity snaked out from her body like a tiny bolt of lightning and struck his hand, causing him to snatch it back in pain. Syl's consciousness passed through the approaching alien object—
stone metal circuit unknown unknown scan weapon scan
—and drew closer to the ship, seeing it, feeling it, exploring its surface, probing for weaknesses, a point of entry, a—

Her thoughts exploded in a babble of voices, as though she had inadvertently tapped into a million—no, a billion—different conversations. The force of it flung her consciousness back into her body, the recoil sending her stumbling against the
Nomad
's hull.

“Don't fire,” she said as she recovered herself. “Please. Don't even move. Do nothing. Do you hear me? Do
nothing
!”

The tone of her voice changed on the final word. It echoed and resonated. Paul felt his body grow still, as though held in place by unseen bonds. He did not struggle against them, though. He did not want to. He found he was no longer quite as afraid. Only his head was capable of movement. He looked at Syl, and her eyes flicked to his. Her lips did not move, yet he heard her voice speak to him.

“
Trust me
,” it said.

And he knew that it was Syl who was doing this, Syl who was holding them in place, Syl who was keeping them from acting against the incoming threat. They had no choice but to do as she said. She had taken all other options from them. Even Meia had lifted her hands from the controls.

Syl's influence might have reduced Paul's fear of the alien threat, but as he stood fixed in place, watching the unknown object grow from a gleaming dot to a revolving orb the size of a small car, his fear of Syl increased.
Trust
: she had picked the very word that had passed through his mind only moments before. Was it a coincidence, or had she somehow been listening to his thoughts? Could she do that? Were her powers that great?

And then the extent of Syl's abilities, and the alien ship, and the orb, were no longer his only sources of concern. The Derith wormhole behind them bloomed for an instant, like a flower opening then collapsing upon itself, and from it emerged another threat: the sleek silver form of the Illyri hunter, a ship of the Diplomatic Corps that had been pursuing them for days, seeking their destruction. From the corner of his eye, he followed its approach on the screens embedded in the intelligent glass of the cockpit windows, so that it was superimposed over the reality of the alien vessel, like a small pale ghost.

Syl's hold over him diminished as she was distracted by the new arrival. Immediately he barked instructions to his crew.

“Steven, hard to port, then come around. Rizzo, prepare to engage. The Diplomat ship is closer, so that's your first target. All weapons.”

And then Paul turned to Syl.

“Don't ever do that again,” he said softly. “Not for any reason. Do you understand? I am in command of this ship and its crew, not you.”

Syl seemed about to argue with him, then saw the fury on his face. She nodded, and looked away, but her eyes were like red-hot coals.

Yet even as the
Nomad
began to move, its engines gave a deep sigh, and died.

T
hey didn't panic. Later, that would be what Paul remembered most clearly about those first seconds after the engines failed, and he was hugely proud of his crew for the way they responded. Rizzo, Thula, Meia, Steven, Alis—each contributed to the diagnostics check, trying to determine the source of the failure. They worked fast, constantly communicating with one another, each telling the others what had been done and what was about to be done.

And all the time Paul watched as the Corps pursuit ship came around in a fast arc to bring them into its sights.

It was Meia who came to the correct conclusion before the others.

“Our systems have been targeted,” she said. “We've lost propulsion, weapons, and navigation, but life support and ancillary power are untouched. We've been carefully disabled.”

Paul looked past the cockpit screens to the sphere, which had slowed its approach and commenced a lazy orbit of the
Nomad
. Beyond it waited the alien vessel.

“That won't be much consolation when we're dead,” said Thula, who was tracking the Corps ship.

“We're in their sights,” said Steven. On the cockpit screen, the Corps vessel turned from green to red.

“They're firing!” said Rizzo.

And they were. From the underside of the pursuit ship appeared two balls of light: torpedoes. The
Nomad
's computer instantly calculated their trajectory, and offered a series of avoidance measures for the pilots to take, none of them applicable for a ship that had no engines upon which to call.

The torpedoes exploded, but long before they had gotten anywhere near the
Nomad
. Paul and the others watched the blasts ripple in a convex shape and disperse, as though the missiles had been fired from inside a great bubble, and their power had failed to breach it. Immediately after the explosions, the pursuit ship gave a lurch and lost all momentum. It too had been crippled by an outside agency, apparently completely immobilized, and nobody had to look very far to figure out just what that agency might be.

A series of thuds came from the body of the
Nomad
.

“What is that?” asked Paul.

“The thing circling us has fired a number of devices,” said Steven. “They've attached themselves to our hull.”

Meia turned to look at Paul.

“We're being scanned,” she said. “My CPU has detected it.”

“She's right,” said Alis. “They're moving through all non-organic systems.”

“But this ship is immune to scans,” said Paul.

“Not any longer,” said Meia.

“It's not only non-organics,” cut in Syl. “I can sense them examining me too.”

It was an odd feeling, and she could only compare it to a kind of caress. It was intrusive, but not entirely unpleasant. She closed her mind to the probing, just in case, but she believed the scan to be physical, and not in any way attuned to psychic activity.

“I don't feel anything,” said Thula.

Suddenly there appeared before him an image of his own body, skinless but identifiable by the shape of his nose, which had been broken so often when he was a boy as to be highly distinctive. Thula could see his lungs pumping, his heart beating, even the twitch of individual muscles. Then the image was magnified rapidly, until within seconds Thula was staring into the deepest workings of his brain, watching as synapses flared.

He risked a quick glance away, and saw that all of the others were also staring at maps of their bodies in varying stages of magnification. Only three were different from the rest. The brief glimpse that Thula got of Meia's insides was much like Alis's, and showed pale tubes and hints of circuitry, alongside unidentifiable organs that were part mechanical and part laboratory-grown flesh. When the scan reached Meia's brain, the patterns revealed were more regimented than his, and the paths taken by the electrical pulses more ordered. He wasn't entirely surprised. He'd never considered himself particularly logical.

Then there was Syl. Her brain scan showed nothing—nothing at all. It was like looking at a ball of dough. A scan of a dead person's brain would probably have revealed something similar.

The projections vanished and the
Nomad
's lights began to flicker on and off. The food processors and heaters powered up, then just as quickly ceased to function. The chemical toilet flushed. Doors opened and closed of their own volition.

“They're deep in our circuitry,” said Meia.

“Why?” asked Paul.

He saw Meia discreetly plug herself into the
Nomad
's systems.

“Careful, Meia,” he said.

Meia jolted as she connected with the ship's computer, but she quickly recovered herself. Her eyes danced in their sockets, flicking back and forth, up and down, following code unseen by the rest of them.

“They're searching,” said Meia.

“For what?”

“Contamination. It's extraordinary. This is scanning on a subatomic level. We have nothing like it. It's—”

Meia spasmed, and her head began to shake uncontrollably. Her hands opened and closed repeatedly, and then the shaking spread to her entire body.