Empyrion II: The Siege of Dome Read online

  Empyrion II: The Siege of Dome

  Copyright © 1986 by Stephen R. Lawhead

  ePub ISBN 978-0-9567731-5-9

  Mobi ISBN 978-0-9567731-4-2

  Published electronically by Lawhead Books

  Visit www.stephenlawhead.com

  Published in the United States of America

  All rights reserved

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Other books by Stephen R. Lawhead

  The Dragon King Trilogy

  In the Hall of the Dragon King

  The Warlords of Nin

  The Sword and the Flame

  Dream Thief

  The Empyrion Saga

  The Search for Fierra

  The Siege of Dome

  The Pendragon Cycle

  Taliesin

  Merlin

  Arthur

  Pendragon

  Grail

  Avalon

  The Song of Albion

  The Paradise War

  The Silver Hand

  The Endless Knot

  Byzantium

  The Celtic Crusades

  The Iron Lance

  The Black Rood

  The Mystic Rose

  Patrick

  The King Raven Trilogy

  Hood

  Scarlet

  Tuck

  Bright Empires

  The Skin Map

  The Bone House (2011)

  The Siege of Dome

  Empyrion II

  by

  Stephen R. Lawhead

  Forward to the 2011 electronic edition

  It’s said that even a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day. The same can be said about virtually every SF writer: stuck in your own time, you’re still bound to get some predictions right. Thus, I take particular satisfaction in publishing this electronic version of a twenty-five-year-old book that imagined something called a ‘laserfile reader’ — a device similar to the one you’re holding right now to read this.

  Everything else that was got wrong will not, I hope, prove too great a distraction to your enjoyment, for the EMPYRION SAGA – consisting of The Search for Fierra and The Siege of Dome – is not an attempt to predict the future. It is, like most works of science fiction, about explaining and understanding the present. In 1985, when the first volume was written, two superpowers vied for world supremacy. One championed individual freedom, the other limited it in the name of a collective good. Both were armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons (still are), and no one was setting a date for an end to the Cold War. The Doomsday Clock was set just a few minutes before midnight in the mid-80s, and like everyone else, my mind was occupied with these matters. As a consequence, my characters were, too.

  Re-reading my own book, I remember the thrill of fearlessly inventing two divergent cultures, each with its own landscape, political and social hierarchy, creation myths and religion. And I remember how fun it was to give characters names such as Orion Treet, Asquith Pizzle, and Giloon Bogney .

  Perhaps this sort of fantasizing was always my first love – an affair born of countless hours in the library stacks with Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut. And maybe it’s significant that I’ve returned to it in recent years. For if we cannot creatively and bravely envision a redemptive future – and do it with a certain degree of humour — what hope is there for the world we must one day inhabit?

  Stephen Lawhead

  Oxford

  2011

  And though the last lights off the black West went

  Oh, morning, at the brown brink Eastward, Springs—

  Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

  World broods with warm breast and ah! bright Wings.

  —G. M. Hopkins, God’s Grandeur

  The Siege of Dome

  Empyrion II

  PROLOGUE

  In the year 98 A.A. Colony suffered a killing contagion that severely decimated the population. This was the time of the Red Death, and many whom Cynetics had raised up were alive then. These were the Original Ancestors, of whom little is now known, except that they were wise in the ways of Expertise and Machine Lore.

  The disease spread despite heroic efforts of the Medico Expertise to contain it. Quarantine measures proved ineffective, and it soon became apparent to the Ancestors that most of Colony would succumb to the Red Death—so termed because of the blood welts that formed on the skin of the victims at the slightest pressure.

  I have seen old records which indicate that the Red Death struck with frightening suddenness, producing chills, vomiting, loss of muscular control, slurred speech, lethargy. The eyeballs of the afflicted were said to become red from burst blood vessels in the eyes. Mucus ran freely from nose and mouth, making breathing difficult, and later impossible as the lungs filled with fluid. Victims of the Red Death drowned in their own mucus, choking, gagging, whimpering in agony as each touch brought a new and painful blood welt to swell the skin. Where these welts burst, a vile, suppurating crust formed. But at this stage, the victim was normally comatose and beyond care. Death followed within thirty-six to forty-eight hours of the disease’s onset.

  In those terrible days one Ancestor in three was taken by the Red Death. The Ancestors knew that for Colony to survive, healthy breeding stock from each Expertise had to be preserved. Those selected for survival were sent out from Colony to live apart in the Hill Country. Others, fearing the disease, attempted to escape by exiling themselves to the wilderness also; but lacking tools and provisions, many of these died from hunger.

  In time, the exiles who had managed to live by eating fish and small mammals returned to find less than a fourth of Colony left alive. The surviving population numbered four thousand. Not one of the Original Ancestors survived.

  The Ancestors attempted to replace every Expertise, organizing survivors to form the HSCs—Human Survival Cells. Each HSC was dedicated to preserving its own Machine Lore, and in this way each Expertise was preserved—all except one called Biogenics, which many survivors believed had created the Red Death.

  It has been said that from this time Cynetics turned its face away from its people, abandoning its children because they fell away from the worship of true spirits. The Cult of Cynetics grew up among the survivors who believed renewed contact with the Divine Spirit would aid them.

  The Four Thousand became the Progenitors of old, who reformed Colony after their own desires, vowing that nothing like the Red Death would ever happen again. Thus began the First Age of Empyrion.

  Feodr Rumon

  Interpretive Chronicles, Volume 1

  After Arrival 2230

  ONE

  Orion Tiberias Treet lifted his face from the page swimming before his eyes, sat up, and glared around, red-eyed, at the untidy stack of blue plastic notebooks he had been reading nonstop for the last few days. He rubbed his whiskered jaw and stood creakily, began swinging his arms, pacing and stretching to get his blood circulating.

  Five days—maybe more, he couldn’t tell for sure—in the subt
erranean Archives of Dome, reading Feodr Rumon’s Interpretive Chronicles, had given him an ache in his head to match the one in his stomach. He had not eaten since returning to Dome, even though, upon entering the Archives, he had found the provisions he and Calin had left behind on their first visit—a time that now seemed impossibly remote.

  The food had long since spoiled, but the water in the sealed jar was good; so he drank sparingly from it and settled down to discover all he could of Empyrion’s lost past. He knew he might never have another chance to read the notebooks, and knew, too, that once he left the safety of the Archives, he might never return. Several days of hunger were worth the price.

  Upon leaving the Archives he would be a hunted man; so Treet was in no hurry to leave his work. He would have to leave soon, though. Already hunger was making him lightheaded and weak. If he waited too long, he might not have strength or wit enough to successfully elude capture and provide some help to Tvrdy and his allies.

  Of course, not knowing what had happened since his escape from Dome, he was at a distinct disadvantage in the strategy department. He assumed the worst. That way he would not be unduly disappointed.

  He wondered what he would find when he decided to leave his hidden enclave, wondered whether there had been a Purge, and whether Tvrdy and Cejka had survived or been brought down. Assuming that they had survived, he wondered how to make contact with them, or with anyone else in a position to help him.

  These matters he pushed from his mind whenever they intruded, and he forced his attention back to his reading. Old Rumon’s Chronicles offered a wealth of information to be mined. He had only to pick up one of the ancient notebooks to be transported to some long-forgotten age of Empyrion’s past. A past which Treet sincerely hoped would offer a clue as to how he might begin averting the catastrophe he had so clearly seen looming over the future of the planet.

  This once-strong hope had turned into a wormy anxiety. For now, having returned, he was far less certain that he’d read the signs of disaster aright. I was so sure of myself before, he argued. Nothing has changed—so why do I doubt myself?

  Doubt was a mild word for it. Whenever he thought about what he had committed himself to, snakes began writhing in his bowels.

  Treet had lived his life trusting his instincts, never looking back. Life was too short, he often told himself, to spend even a second in regret. Now, it appeared that his ever-trustworthy instincts had betrayed him and backward glancing would become a way of life.

  On the strength of his gut feeling he had left the Fieri and their magnificent civilization to return to Dome on the narrowest of chances that he might somehow forestall the doom that only he seemed to see.

  On the strength of his gut feeling he had sacrificed his own best chance for future happiness by alienating the only woman he’d ever really loved, the only woman who, quite possibly, had ever loved him.

  On the strength of his gut feeling he had set in motion a series of events which had caused the messy death of a beautiful friend. He missed Calin—would have ached for the loss of her had not grief numbed him. Still, the thought of her death and the sting of his own guilt for the part he played in it were never far away. And the gruesome battle between him and the demented Crocker, which had claimed the gentle magician’s life, was replayed nightly in his dreams in brutal, bloody detail.

  All this—the torment of those memories, of second-guessing himself, dark bouts of self-accusation—he struggled to hold aside long enough to learn as much as possible about Empyrion Colony’s past in the short time he had to give to the task. And, despite his growing uncertainty about his mission, he still felt this to be crucially important.

  So, ignoring all else as he ignored the vacuum in his stomach gnawing at his concentration, he returned to the nest he’d made for himself on the floor and opened the notebook he’d been reading for the last few hours. The binding, brittle with age and cracked in a dozen places, bore the handwritten tag Volume 19, signifying he was one-quarter of the way through Empyrion’s Third Age, as classified by Rumon.

  He took out his bookmark—a folded sheet of paper bearing the notes he had scratched with an old polymer stylus found in a nearby bin—and read what he’d written:

  Colony Foundation = 1 AA

  Red Death = 98 AA

  Plebiscite Rejected = 309 AA

  Colony Splits = 311 AA

  Second Split = 543 AA

  First Purge = 586 AA

  Directorate Installed = 638 AA

  Flight of the Fieri = 833 AA

  Fieri Settlement Est. = 1157 AA

  Cluster Closed = 1270 AA

  Fieri Scattered = 1318 AA

  Directorate Overthrown = 1473 AA

  Second Purge = 1474 AA

  Threl Established = 1485 AA

  It was the record of civilization born to turmoil, much the same as any civilization. But what made Empyrion’s record so sad—and this was the part that really got to Treet—was that the colony had advantages never possessed by any other civilization he’d ever encountered: they had started out with all the tools for creating Utopia right from the very beginning; they had all of history to teach them how to organize and govern themselves. They might have chosen to recreate Eden.

  Instead, they chose Hell.

  Treet’s list of major historical events was the record of a society descending inexorably into tyranny. From the rejection of the first citizens’ plebiscite to the establishment of the Threl, Dome had consistently chosen the downward course, evading at every turn the opportunity to rise; choosing—not only once, but time and time again—the collective will over individual rights, manipulation over liberty, expedience over benevolence, repression over freedom.

  Through years of upheaval, through painful splits and bloody purges, the leaders of Dome relentlessly pursued the downward track. It was all right there in the notebooks—the damning evidence of a society throwing away human rights and freedoms with both hands, shedding all the higher and ennobling qualities that enlightened governments had fought so hard for since the dawn of time.

  Yes, Treet thought gloomily, it was all there, faithfully recorded in the notebooks.

  He still had nine fat notebooks to go, but was beginning to doubt whether he could finish before hunger made it impossible. Already the hand-lettered printout pages swam before his eyes, and his concentration was so fragile he was forced to read a single paragraph several times to get anything out of it. But at least he had discovered that catastrophe had taken place in Empyrion’s past to shape its future—a future he was living now: the Red Death.

  Based on Rumon’s scant reference, Treet strongly suspected a genetic experiment gone haywire. Perhaps they had been attempting to adapt an indigenous lifeform or create a new bacteria strain for some purpose past remembering. However it was, once the contagion was loosed upon the colony, nothing could stop it. The disease had killed, by Treet’s calculation, close to twelve thousand people, three-quarters of Empyrion’s total population; by comparison, not even the plagues of the Old Middle Ages were so devastating.

  When the Red Death had finally run its course, Empyrion was changed forever.

  Treet found his place in the book and began reading. In just a few minutes he was exhausted, but struggled to keep at it for a few hours more. In the end, he had no choice but to admit defeat and lay the notebook down carefully. He had to have something to eat. Now. But before he could eat, he’d have to find a way past the guard station outside the Archives and then a place to hide until Tvrdy could be contacted.

  He took out the map he had found on his first day back in the Archives. There was no telling how old the map was, or how accurate. Though it only showed two lower levels, one of which was mislabeled Archives Level, he supposed it could be trusted to point the way to the Old Section where he hoped to find refuge.

  Treet stood and steadied himself as spots like tiny black fireflies swarmed before his eyes. He left the hidden room, taking a last look behind him as he enter
ed the dry pipeline and made his way back to the Archives floor. As he walked along, one arm outstretched, touching the side of the pipe, he thought again about how he might elude the guards. Surprise would be on his side, he figured, for whatever that was worth. And he supposed that he might find some sturdy hunk of something to use as a weapon. Beyond that, he had no notion of how he might proceed.

  He retraced his steps to the junction box and continued along the second pipe until he reached the metal ladder leading to the Archive floor, placed his foot on the first rung, and hauled himself up. It was then that he heard the clang and groan and felt the tremor of a heavy machine rumbling across the floor above.

  TWO

  Tanais Director Tvrdy crept along the darkened tunnel, pausing every few meters to listen again. He heard only the tick of his own footsteps echoing off the endless tile. He hunched his coat over his shoulders and wished for the millionth time that Pradim had not been killed. He would have trouble finding another guide—if he were ever to find one—who could be trusted so completely in so many delicate areas. Over the years, Pradim had become less a tool than a confidant and friend, and not incidentally a strategist of impressive powers.

  If he missed the blind guide, the Cabal would miss him more. Reeling from the defeat Jamrog had forced upon them—for that’s what Sirin Rohee’s sudden and as yet unexplained death was: a crippling, paralyzing defeat—Tvrdy fought now just to maintain his position within the Threl. One way or another, Jamrog meant to have his head.

  And one way or another, Tvrdy meant to keep it. If staying alive meant abandoning his Directorship, so be it. Only a fool like Hladik would insist on clinging to his dwindling power to the death. If Tvrdy allowed Jamrog to kill him in his bed, the Cabal was finished. And if the Cabal, small though it was and ill-equipped, passed from Empyrion, all resistance to Jamrog’s rule would effectively vanish.

  That was why he was making this journey now, alone, in the stark, predawn hours of a bleak and hopeless day, to make contact with Giloon Bogney, legendary leader of the faceless nonbeings, the Dhogs.

  A message had been sent through the Rumon messenger network—Tvrdy didn’t know how Cejka managed, but was thankful for such a clever and resourceful ally—and, what was most miraculous, an answer in the form of detailed directions had been received. Giloon agreed to a meeting in the Isedon Zone, that empty ring of ruined Hageblocks that formed the no-man’s-land between the Hages and the Old Section. The condition was that Tvrdy come alone and bring some proof that he was in fact a Threl Director.