Sacred Planet: Book One of the Dominion Series (35 page)

Orion Arm, on the planet Earth . . .

Dizziness made Sierra stumble to the side, grabbing hold of her father for support. His sturdy arm lifted her, stabilized her. The euphoric expression on his face registered only slight concern as he looked down.

“Sierra? You alright?”

“Yes, of course. A little overwhelmed.” Sierra straightened and took her hands away, narrowing her vision to the path ahead.

The crowds trekked up the ramp with quiet joy and expectant faces, everyone draped in jubilant white or heather gray. Some spoke hushed words to each other. Others laughed in sheer delight. For many, this pilgrimage was their first. That included Sierra, which was probably why she felt so jittery, so strangely afraid. An aura pervaded this whole area, a profound weight. Ancient stones stacked one on another, left in place from the time when God walked with the children of Moses. The chalky limestone blocks emanated an air of holiness, specialness. Just stones, yes—rocks from the ground—but ones that carried so much meaning, history, and mystique.

Between the iron bars arching over the ramp, Sierra saw the Wailing Wall below, where hundreds of faithful swayed in prayer, reading from old paper books or kissing the sacred stones again and again. Men and boys with curled ringlets of hair and black jackets went left, while women and girls in dark dresses and head scarves went right, praying and dancing and singing and weeping in their designated sections. A thousand emotions streamed into the cool night air from those who had gathered to remember their past and to plead for their future.

A woman wearing a long white scarf over her head lifted her hands high, grimacing in terrible inner pain. Eyes closed, in a passionate voice, she proclaimed a long stream of Hebrew Sierra didn’t understand. The prima filia moved closer to the edge to see as she continued upward. Other women gathered, raising their hands, crying together, voices blending into one wounded yowl.

Lydia stepped closer to Sierra from behind. “They pray for their nation, that their people would return to Yahweh, and that Yahweh will restore their freedom.”

“Freedom?” Sierra looked around the large square below, where hundreds of bodies flowed in every possible direction. A swirl of humanity. “Aren’t they free already?”

“They have some freedoms,” Lydia said in her characteristically thoughtful, measured tone. “But they want independence from . . . from outsiders.”

Sierra had more questions, and she knew Lydia had the answers, but a guard holding a black, heavy-looking gun eyed them as they passed. He had pale skin and wore the Confed symbol on his uniform. Once they had gotten a few steps ahead, he leaned over to another guard—an Arab—and whispered something.

“Let’s not talk about this until we’re in private,” Lydia said under her breath, then slowed her pace to let the Prime family get ahead.

The secrecy didn’t help Sierra’s nerves. Despite the melodic, a capella Hebrew music playing from scattered speakers and the joyous faces of her fellow Carinians, she sensed the magnitude of the hill they ascended. It was as if they were climbing Mount Olympus to dine with Zeus and his cohort of gods, except here and now, they climbed the holy mountain to pray and pay homage to the unknowable, inaccessible, eternal, mysterious, omnipotent God.
The
God. Not a story or a chapter in one of Lydia’s assigned readings but rather the wonderfully and fearfully
real
God of all humans throughout all time.

The sign illuminated at the entrance to the Jerusalem Temple Mount, written in three languages but only one Sierra could understand, put a lump in her throat.

Noble Sanctuary / Temple Mount

The Terran Confederacy Welcomes All Children of God

Under the sign, on both sides, two armed guards skimmed the oncoming crowd with hard, cold eyes. Ponderous machine guns hung from leather straps around their shoulders. A surprising welcome.

* * *

The giant square buzzed with life and movement. A path cleared on the stone grounds, where bizarrely dressed men formed two lines, awaiting the chance to smile and nod and shake the hand of Sierra’s father. She and her mother trailed behind. It seemed as if he had to shake every hand, nod back to every man.

All
men
. All dressed in those funny robes—some white, some black, some a mixture of the two. Some bearded, some clean-shaven. Some wearing tall, ornate hats. Some wearing only little woven caps on the peak of their head. It was as if they’d been transported back thousands of years to a time when people still wore clothes like that, when the great religions still shunned the equality of women. Sierra felt a certain pleasure, even in her cocoon of self-conscious nerves, being honored by great men, smiling as they bowed to her. A teenage girl from a thousand lightyears away commanded the respect of Earth’s greatest religious leaders.

They clumped together by religion, too, she noticed. Jews stood together. Behind them the Christians. On the other side, the Muslims. The longer she observed, the more she understood. They spoke amongst themselves in strange languages, wearing proud and awed faces, straightening when her father stepped up and clasped their hands. Most of them just nodded. Some enunciated the few Anglo-Universal phrases they knew.

“Bless you, Prime Minister.”

“God be with you.”

“Welcome.”

Hovercams flitted around, adjusting angles to snap pictures or capture video. It felt strange for Sierra to think that thousands, maybe millions, here on Earth would see her and talk about her—her dress or her hair. She felt awkward and showy in the floral blue dress Lydia had picked out, a lone stroke of color on a canvas of black and white.

Overhead, a line of blinking green lights caught her eye. From the glow of the city, she made out criss-crossing bars forming long, arcing structures over the Temple Mount. It looked like scaffolding in the pale light.

“Sierra,” Lydia said in a quiet but firm voice. “You can study the Bastion later.”

Ahead lay the reason for their visit, the final destination of their pilgrimage to the Sacred Planet’s holy sites. The journey took them to the Shrine of the Bab on Mount Carmel with those breathtaking views, to the verdant gardens and gold-tipped iron gates around the Shrine of Baha’u’llah, to the stunning vastness of Mecca’s Sacred Mosque and the quiet reverence of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. That journey ended here, in this well-trodden square on a hill in Jerusalem. Ahead, lit by powerful lights from below, rose a majestic, tile-covered structure, white at the bottom and blue above, capped by a proud, golden dome.

“Dome of the Rock,” Lydia whispered from behind. “Once the site of the Jewish temple.”

“That isn’t their temple?” Sierra asked, feeling very young.

“No, their temple was destroyed by the Romans in seventy AD as punishment for a rebellion.”

“How long did the Romans stay in this region?”

Lydia took in a breath, thinking. “Hundreds of years.”

“How long has the Terran Confederacy controlled it?”

“Almost eighty years now.”

A few generations, Sierra noted to herself.

The Carinian party reached the end of the crowd at the beginning of some stairs leading up to the dome’s courtyard. More Terran Confederacy guards clutching bulky rifles lined the steps. The monochromatic crowd fell in behind them, everyone proceeding to the bizarrely beautiful structure ahead for prayer.

“It looks Byzantine,” Sierra said, remembering pictures from her studies. “Is it Christian?”

“It was built in that era,” Lydia replied. “But no, the Muslims built it after they swept through this entire—”

“
All glory to Gaaahd!
” the shrieking voice pierced the soft murmurings of the crowd. Barely a second passed before—

BOOM!

A deep explosion split the tiled ground and blasted fire and shrapnel from bushes beside the stairs. The blast shredded a few guards into bloody messes and engulfed others in a rush of smoke and dust. Sierra was thrust away by its sheer force, landing hard on the edge of a step and sliding. Her ribs throbbed instantly. The air all around turned dark and thick. Her legs rested on top of a motionless Carinian man in white, lying on his stomach with blood streaking down his forehead, one arm contorted awkwardly, the other a ragged and gory muddle ending somewhere above the elbow.

Sierra’s mind lagged in registering everything.

Feet scuffed the ground around her. Voices shouted, a hundred at once, blending together into a chaotic jumble. Men and women in flowy white, holding stark, black handguns, scuttled into a circle around Sierra and her parents for protection, electric eyes scouring the mayhem. Her father helped up her mother, who held her shoulder with a pained grimace. Sierra looked around for Lydia. She was nowhere. A scattering of bodies stayed on the ground, not moving. Crimson circles spread through pure white garments. Sierra shut her eyes.

The bodyguards got them up, surrounded them in a tight cluster, and moved back the way they had come. The courtyard had cleared for the most part, now swarming with guards in Confed uniforms.

A scraggy man in a long coat dashed out from the throng around the exit, zigzagging between guards. The Carinians stopped as Confed guards chased him down, ripping his coat off one shoulder. A flashing, lumpy vest clung to his waist like a cummerbund.

As the Confed guards gathered and seized him, he let out a cry in rough Universal: “All glory to God!”

BOOM!

The clump of guards disappeared in a flurry of fire and smoke. The bodyguards closed in around Sierra and her parents, pressing their bodies together. Hands pressed over Sierra’s head.

“Where’s Lydia?” Sierra asked, then raised her voice. “Lydia!”

Before anyone could answer, a woman’s voice penetrated the ruckus: “All glory to God!”

But one of the Carinian bodyguards snapped up his gun and fired. Nearby, the woman’s body fell, and the Confed guards ran away from it. No explosion came, but the Carinians avoided her all the same.

They rushed down the ramp they had so joyously ascended just a few minutes earlier. Confed guards rushed past them, dozens of them, toward the hilltop.

“Lydia!” Sierra called out. “Lydia . . .”

With a bodyguard’s hand on one shoulder and her father’s hand on the other, she couldn’t stop, could barely even glance back.

“Lydia!”

They surged on like a train, all running as one, so close she could hear the hard breathing of her father and mother and the men whose job it was to protect them. The blare of sirens flooded the evening sky. Then, faintly from behind, Sierra heard a sound so familiar she recognized it even in the commotion.

“Sierra! I’m alright. Keep going.” The voice of her teacher, her mentor.

A cascade of relief swept through Sierra’s chest and into her tingling limbs and jittery fingers, even as her head swam with a single question:
Why? Why? Why?

* * *

It was a blur, the speedy shuttle flight over the old city of Jerusalem to the spaceport. Nervous glances and speechless looks flitted between them as medics patched their wounds. Lydia barely let out a whimper as they wrapped her broken forearm. Sierra squeezed her other hand in silence, not knowing what to say. Too numb to think, brain stalling from shock. Everyone hugged, free from the formality that normally restrained them. Even Sierra’s father stepped past his aides and held her for a minute, setting off mixed and unexplainable emotions. Her father so rarely showed such vulnerability or care. It felt good to put her arms around him, to have his arms around her. But it felt long overdue, and fleeting, and slightly uncomfortable.

The bodyguards loaded everyone in open-air jeeps and hurried them back to the spaceplane. Once aboard, it took only a few minutes to take off. The plane’s powerful vertical engines thrust them straight up, then tilted as they curved into the cloudy night sky, reflecting orange and tan light from the city below.

More engines kicked on at the rear of the plane and squished Sierra back into her seat. Out the window, the clouds disappeared, the roar of passing air quieted, the shaking of her seat stilled. Gravity vanished. Stars appeared—an endless field of them. Sierra felt her shoulders relax. Tension faded. Thoughts of death receded.

At the front of the cabin, her father and mother and some political aides discussed reports from the Confed. She heard the name “Defenders of Glory” tossed around a handful of times. She ignored them, sinking into a deep silence. It amazed and terrified her that anyone could choose to end their life like that—vaporized by an explosion that began a centimeter from their skin. Suddenly, her own life seemed so fragile. The air in her lungs could be emptied so easily. The endless beating of her heart could be stopped. Just a few shreds of shrapnel was all it would take . . .

In a few hours, they and their entourage of gunships had reached the spacebend gate just inside the system’s asteroid belt. Sierra went up to the cockpit to watch two gunships pick up speed, widen the gap between each other, and disappear one at a time through the massive mechanical ring. One moment, light reflected off the silver metal of a gunship. The next moment, it blinked out and was gone.

Then her family’s plane approached the giant ring, closer and closer until it swallowed them. When they passed through it, there was no flash, no noise, no sensation. Only a quick blurring of the stars, then pricks of light zipping by in arced lines.

The magnitude of the universe shrank to a spattering of beams blazing across the windshield.

* * *

When Sierra woke up, they were back in Carina. A journey across hundreds of lightyears would normally take weeks or months, but travelling through the TransCarina Highway took only days with the gates at each nexus bunched so close together. In a few more days, they’d be back home, on Baha’runa. Life would go back to normal—at least, that’s what Sierra hoped.

For some reason, when she thought of her normal life—sipping holly on the lawn or going to parties with her friends in the capital—she felt sick, and her heart beat faster. Why did the thought of a normal life seem so strange now? So wrong?