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“You look pale. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Carver said. “Just wondering what it is we’re about to open. Please, go on.”

Brigid read the whole chant that had been written onto the knife, drawing from her incredible memory to interpret the ancient symbols as best she could.

Beware! I am the bringer of Death, the Destroyer of Souls, the alpha and the omega, the vanishing point. Mourn now the end of your life’s journey, for all shall fall before my power, their family line expunged from all histories, their bodies returned to Tiamat. I am the blade Godkiller. Gaze upon my bloodwork and lament.

“This is the symbol for Enlil,” she explained as Kane and Grant returned to the discussion at the display cabinet, “but it’s been altered.”

“Altered how?” Kane asked.

Brigid pointed to the knife’s hilt before looking up at Kane and Grant. There was clear concern in her emerald eyes. “It’s the name of the knife’s owner,” she explained. “I think it means Son of Enlil.”

Infinity Breach

Outlanders^®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Headlong themselves they threw

Down from the verge of Heaven, eternal wrath

Burnt after them to the bottomless pit.

—Paradise Lost

John Milton 1608–1674

The Road to Outlands—
From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology…a question to a keeper of the archives…a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 1

October 31, 1930

Somewhere in the South Pacific

Hiding amid the foliage, a beautiful woman peered through a set of compact binoculars in the direction the U.S. naval base. Demy Octavo was a tall, shapely figure, sheathed in a formfitting outfit of soft brown leather that clung to her every enticing curve like poured mercury. Matching leather gloves on her hands accentuated her long, elegant fingers, and a pair of matching handguns were strapped to the swell of her hips. The compact pistols were modified versions of the Beretta Model 1915, and their silver handles were engraved with the columnlike symbol of the Fascist party along with the motto Viva La Morte, or Long Live Sacrifice. Octavo’s tight-fitting ensemble left only her head uncovered, but for the moment her striking features remained hidden behind the binoculars.

Octavo’s skin was tanned to a wonderful bronze shade from hours spent reclining on the beautiful golden beaches of the Mediterranean, and she had carefully painted her lips a luscious, rich color known as falu red. Her long, dark hair swung freely behind her, cascading over her delicate shoulders like a waterfall, loose strands catching now and then on the island breeze. Her hair was a shade of brown so dark as to be almost black, and her tresses held a slight kink that was pleasing to the eye.

Demy Octavo was on a mission, sent to the South Pacific by her government under the auspices of Benito Mussolini himself, tasked to acquire important American military secrets. And yet, hidden in the natural cover of the island’s green-and-yellow ferns, the gorgeous Signorina Octavo did not watch the naval base. Instead, she had turned her binoculars to the skies above, where a single-seater airplane cut through the air, its engine buzzing like an angry hornet. The airplane was an experimental model, one not yet in general production. Sleek lines swooped back from the aircraft’s pointed nose cone, where an intake unit sucked in a stream of air to hurry its passage through the cloudless blue skies above the rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean. A glass blister protruded midway along the sharpened length of the dartlike aircraft, like a bubble on a stream, and a figure could be seen sitting within, piloting the strange vehicle with grim determination.

Demy Octavo knew that plane and she knew the figure who guided it through the azure sky. The pilot’s name was Abraham Flag, a gifted scholar and full-time adventurer who had done more for the American government in the past five years than any other man.

Tales of Abraham Flag’s exploits were splashed across the front page of every newspaper in America with alarming regularity, but those stories could only scratch the surface of Flag’s true contribution to the well-being and sanctity of the Land of the Free. However, Flag himself was no government employee. He worked for an even more noble cause, one he had described in his few rare interviews to the gentlemen of the press as “the continuance and evolution of mankind.”

The beautiful Signorina Octavo had clashed with Flag on several occasions in the past when her goals had conflicted with his own. They had met on the moonlit streets of Paris, Octavo armed with only a stiletto blade hidden in her stocking top beneath a cerise evening gown, and Flag armed with nothing but his keen intellect as they vied for possession of a meteorite of breathtaking mineral worth. They had become close then, as they found themselves in the romantic City of Lights, but, when he had realized the wicked government that Octavo represented, Flag had resisted the woman’s abundant charms. Instead, Professor Flag’s determined spirit had remained focused solely on preventing the invaluable meteor from falling into the wrong hands.

Even now, as Demy Octavo tracked Flag’s plane with her binoculars, she recalled those tender moments in Paris, before Flag had discovered the nature of her real mission. He had left with the meteor, and she had been forced to report her absolute failure to Mussolini. A man not renowned for his even temper, Mussolini had erupted with rage at the news.

Octavo watched the remarkable plane as it swooped around in a long, banking curve, almost as though its extraordinary pilot was taking one last, long look of the tiny Pacific island before deciding to land. Octavo knew that was not the case—Italian intelligence operatives had learned of the discovery in question three days ago when they had intercepted an urgent message that had been wired to Flag’s New York apartment, requesting his assistance as swiftly as possible. Flag himself had been out of the country at the time, working in his fabled Laboratory of the Incredible, where he was not to be disturbed, and so two of his frequent colleagues had gone in his stead. It had been two full days before Flag himself had responded to the U.S. Navy’s summons to confirm this appointment with mystery, a further day for him to reach the island from his laboratory in the Antarctic. Octavo smiled wickedly at the thought—Flag’s other commitment had given her time to charter a mail plane via New Zealand, which had brought her close enough to the tiny island to drop in the waters and swim ashore, unseen by the patrolling military.

The island itself was barely more than a pinprick on the map, a little-known territory of the United States of America called Isle Terandoa. Less than a decade before, the whole structure had been below the water, but a shift in the tectonic plates had revealed the atoll, and the U.S. had been quick to organize a small naval presence there. Tucked away between New Zealand and the western coast of South America, Terandoa had been used as a test site for the Navy, a place where they could try out prototype seagoing vessels well away from public scrutiny. More recently, the tiny island, which was no more than four miles square, had played grudging host to a team of archaeologists whose tedious excavation work had been seen as a dangerous compromise to security by the local Navy commander, a proud man called Edmond Kinver. Against Kinver’s requests, the brass in Washington had insisted that a small team from Harvard be given access to Terandoa, and so he had curtly accepted them, fencing off each area that they studied and hurrying them along in their painstaking work. That was, at least, until the head of the archaeological team, a man called Ross Moorcroft, had made an unexpected discovery. Moorcroft had brought his discovery to the attention of General Kinver, and soon after the call had gone out for Abraham Flag’s expertise.

The steady drone of the airplane’s engine grew louder to Octavo’s ears as Flag brought the sleek one-man craft in to land on the single airstrip inside the naval compound. The powerful lenses of Demy Octavo’s binoculars followed the aircraft’s descent and landing, and she waited patiently to see what would happen next. Five seconds passed, then ten, until finally that strange glass bubble that rested atop the arrow-shaped craft sprang open, flipping to one side on a hinged arrangement until it hung at the starboard side of the aircraft. A moment later, the pilot’s hand emerged and the powerful form of the mighty man of adventure vaulted from the cockpit, his booted feet gliding down the short run of steps that had been molded into the side of his unique aircraft.

As Flag’s toe struck the black tarmac of the landing strip, General Kinver, who stood to attention, offered the fabled adventurer a brisk salute. Two dozen sailors wearing smart dress uniforms stood to attention behind their general in the blazing midday sun, and from the end of the baking runway two men in civilian dress watched the proceedings. The first of these men had bright red hair and his shoulders were so wide that he reminded one of a football player still wearing his shoulder pads. The wide man’s name was Barnaby B. Barnaby, and he was an archaeologist of some renown. Beside Barnaby stood a much shorter man who wore an ill-fitting suit with a dark, sombre tie and a fedora hat. The man’s name was Anthony Pontfract, though he was known to his friends as “Little Ant.” Little Ant was a master linguist who was able to speak and read several dozen languages fluently and instinctively apply that knowledge to numerous others. Both men had a long history of accompanying Flag on his endeavors, and their companionship dated back to a period in the Great War when all three men had been incarcerated in a notorious prisoner of war camp.

Crouched amid the foliage almost one thousand yards away, Demy Octavo, the glamorous Italian secret agent, was unable to discern the words that were spoken. Thus, she simply watched in silence as Kinver exchanged pleasantries with Flag, patting him on the shoulder like an old friend as the smartly dressed squadron of his best men stood rigidly to attention at the side of the airstrip. Barnaby and Little Ant made their way along the airstrip to meet their friend, with Little Ant hurrying along to keep up with Barnaby’s distance-humbling strides.

It had been just a few months since Octavo’s most recent encounter with Abraham Flag, but the adventurer’s appearance still surprised her, making her heart flutter for just a moment like that of a giddy schoolgirl. Flag was an immense man, over six feet in height, with wide shoulders, muscular arms and sturdy legs. As such, the first impression he gave was not one of size so much as of exceptional power. Demy Octavo had been witness to several of Flag’s superhuman feats, and she knew that it was more than simply an impression of power that this singular man exuded. He wore his dark hair close to his skull, swept back from his high, intelligent forehead in the tidy style he had favored since his military days during the Great War. His eyes were a piercing purplish-blue, like two magnificent amethysts set beneath his unlined brow. He wore a casual shirt beneath a flight jacket of brown leather, similar in color to Octavo’s own outfit. His shirt, like his pants, was a shade of deep blue, complementing and exaggerating the color of his fascinating, unearthly eyes.

Flag and his two associates strode alongside General Kinver toward the main office building of the small naval base. Watching from afar, Demy Octavo was impressed in spite of herself to see Flag turn to the waiting sailors and salute them, taking a few moments to honor them for coming out to greet him in the roasting Pacific sunshine. Demy Octavo watched as Flag and his companions disappeared into the main building with the commander at their side.

Once the four men had disappeared from view, the beautiful, dark-haired Italian agent took the compact set of field glasses from her eyes, folding them in on themselves on a butterfly hinge mechanism before replacing them in the protective casing that she wore strapped to the small of her shapely back. Then, carefully scanning her surroundings for guards, Demy Octavo slowly pushed forward through the thick foliage, closing in on the mysterious objective that she and Abraham Flag shared.

ABRAHAM FLAG narrowed his eyes momentarily as he and General Kinver stepped out of the bright sunlight and into the relative darkness of the two-story administrative building, allowing his remarkable eyes to adjust and letting his other senses assess his new surroundings. Flag was a man unlike any other. His natural senses—smell, hearing, touch and taste, as well as his eyesight—were disciplined to an incredible level of prowess, and he relied upon those senses to sift through great swathes of information that the average man might easily ignore or miss altogether. Abraham Flag maintained the firm belief that every detail might hold a crucial warning, a pivotal fact that would yield its secrets if only one took the time to consider it fully. And unlike most men, Flag was able to consider those facts at lightning speed, such was his prodigious intellect.

“Where is the artifact?” Flag asked in a voice whose rich timbre both commanded authority and put its listeners at their ease.

Barnaby spoke up, his voice booming in the corridor as he led the way to a closed door. “The commander gave over an office just through here, Abe,” he explained as he pushed open the door. “We’ve spent the last two days trying to work out what this thing is made of.”

Flag stood stock-still in the doorway and looked across the room to the artifact. Resting on a work top, surrounded by Barnaby’s notes and a series of spectrographic photographs, was the artifact. It appeared to be a knife, its blade thin but stretching almost the length of a man’s forearm, like the itak machete used by the Filipinos for combat. The blade and hilt appeared to be of a piece, and as Flag stepped closer, he realized that they had been carved of stone. Its surface glistened under the lights of the room, like a polished volcanic stone, and Flag saw indentations all along its surface—writing. He glanced at the writing for a moment, instantly recognizing the ancient characters from a language that dated back several millennia. There appeared to be at least three dozen tiny characters etched into the blade’s surface, and Flag presumed that a similar number would be apparent were he to turn the weapon over.

Barnaby B. Barnaby spoke up as Flag looked at the weapon. “It’s at least three thousand years old, Professor. I’d estimate maybe five or six thousand years.”

Flag spoke without looking up from the object on the desk. “What does it say, Ant?”

Little Ant had already pulled a small notepad from his ill-fitting jacket’s breast pocket, thumbing through its dog-eared pages in anticipation of his ally’s question. “It’s ancient Mesopotamian, Chief,” the famed linguist explained. “There’s quite a lot of it, and there are characters here I don’t even understand, but the essence of it is a war chant, like a song. It says ‘Beware! I am the bringer of Death,’ et cetera.”

As Little Ant spoke, Abraham Flag reached into his own jacket and produced a pair of white cotton gloves of the thinnest of material, which he then placed over his hands. Wearing the gloves, Flag carefully lifted the stone knife and held it close to his gaze, running his eyes along the writing there. Working in silence, Flag flipped the knife over and scanned the characters along the other side of the blade before speaking once more.

“A war chant?” he repeated thoughtfully. “Did you find any indication to whom this chant was addressed, or who the owner of the knife might have been?”

“Nothing like that,” Little Ant admitted, “but I did find one name on it.”

“A name?” Flag encouraged, his purple-blue eyes flicking up to lock with the linguist’s.

“‘Godkiller,’” Ant read from his notes. “I think it’s the name of the knife itself.”

Chapter 2

Early twenty-third century

Antarctica

White on white. That’s what the Antarctic was. That’s all the Antarctic was.

Grant stood beside the cooling hull of his Manta craft, looking at the monotonous landscape that surrounded him. It was white as far as the eye could see, a freshly laundered sheet, stretching to the north, south, east and west. On closer scrutiny, Grant could make out that here was snow, there was ice and, billowing across it all, tossed about in the currents of the fierce winds, icy flakes of snow and snowy flecks of ice.

Snow and ice, white on white. Until this moment, Grant, who by any estimation was a well-traveled man, had never appreciated quite how many different gradations of white there could be.

Grant was a huge man, his skin like polished ebony, with black hair, close-cropped atop his scalp and shaped around his lips in a gunslinger’s mustache. Though he wore a puffy white jacket and pants, there was no disguising his powerful frame. There was a bulky lump on his right sleeve, the only evidence of the hidden sidearm Grant carried there.

As he turned back to the Manta, somehow relieved to see its obtrusive bronze form amid this white canvas, Grant pulled at the fur-lined hood of his jacket, raising it over his head. He didn’t feel cold, even out here in the arctic chill that was dipping to 40 below, but the wind was howling in his ears like a wolf howling at the moon. The shadow suit Grant wore beneath his jacket helped keep him warm. The shadow suit was a remarkable weave of advanced technology that provided a temperature-controlled environment for its wearer, along with protection against radiation and environmental toxins, as well as some protection from blunt trauma. Despite these incredible properties, the shadow suit was wafer thin, a one-piece bodysuit finished in black that could be easily slipped beneath other clothes. It was like wearing a suit of armor, but with none of the associated restriction of movement.

As the wind churned up the snow like a flight of doves, Grant stepped into the protective lee of the Manta craft and began to speak, seemingly to no one but himself.

“Kane?” he said. “I can’t see shit down here. Are you planning on landing anytime soon?”

Kane’s firm voice came to Grant’s ear a moment later, sounding so clear that he might be standing next to the man in a sheltered room far away from the blizzard’s howling winds. The communications were routed through Commtact units, top-of-the-line communication devices that had been found in Redoubt Yankee years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Theoretically, even a completely deaf wearer would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact.

As well as offering radio communications, the units could also be used as translation devices, providing a real-time interpretation of foreign language if sufficient vocabulary had been programmed into their data banks.

“Cool your jets,” Kane grumbled over the Commtact. “I’m bringing her in now.”

Before the final syllable of Kane’s proclamation had concluded, Grant saw the dark shadow appear overhead, dipping through the swirling snow, and a moment later the graceful shape of the Manta craft settled on the white blanket of snow beside him.

The Mantas were alien craft, left on Earth for millennia before being discovered by Grant and Kane during one of their exploratory missions. The beauty of their design was breathtaking, an effortless combination of every principle of aerodynamics wrapped up in a gleaming bronze finish. They had the shape and general configuration of seagoing manta rays, flattened wedges with graceful wings curving out from their bodies. The elongated hump in the center of the craft was the only evidence of a cockpit. The Mantas featured a wingspan of twenty yards, and a body length of almost fifteen feet. Finished in a bronze metallic hue, the surfaces of each craft were decorated with curious geometric designs; elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols that covered the entire body of the aircraft. The Mantas were propelled by two different types of engines—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation air spikes—allowing them flight in the skies and outside of the atmosphere.

Grant watched as the cockpit to the second Manta opened and two figures stepped out. Like him, both of them were dressed in white, wearing fur-lined jackets and white pants.

The first figure was a woman in her mid-twenties. She had vibrant red hair that trailed down her back like a burst of evening sunlight. Even as she stepped from the graceful wing of the Manta, the woman was bunching her hair back behind her head, pulling it away from her face as the Arctic wind blew it about her face. After a moment, she tied her hair back and looked up at Grant with her warm, friendly smile, her emerald eyes glinting with a furious intellect. Brigid Baptiste had been a crucial part of their triumvirate ever since Grant had joined the operation known as Cerberus. While her high forehead pointed to an intellectual aspect, her full lips suggested a more playful, passionate side; in truth, Brigid Baptiste was both of these and more besides.

Behind the attractive figure of Brigid Baptiste, the third member of the field team exited the Manta’s cockpit, even as the snow started to settle on its sloping bronze wings. This was Kane, Grant’s longtime partner, whose friendship was unquestioned, whose loyalty was unswerving. Grant had known Kane ever since their days in Cobaltville where they had been initially partnered as Magistrates, the strong-arm force that kept the citizenry in check. Whereas Grant was powerfully built and bulky, Kane was tall and lean with most of his bulk in his upper body. It had been said that Kane’s physique was like a wolf’s, and often his temperament was similarly inclined. He was pack leader, loner and scout. Like Grant, a bulky lump showed beneath the wrist of Kane’s jacket where he held his sidearm for quick access.

“Seen anything interesting?” Kane asked as he greeted Grant.

“Snow,” Grant grumbled, his deep voice sounding like a rumbling volcano.

Kane looked around before turning back to Grant with a self-deprecating grin. “Kind of samey, isn’t it?”

Grant nodded, his own mouth breaking into a grin.

“Monotonous,” Brigid corrected them both without looking up from the portable radar device she was consulting in her gloved hand, “is the word you are looking for. ‘Samey’? Honestly, who taught you two to speak?”

Kane glanced over Brigid’s head and caught Grant’s eye as the redheaded woman began walking away from the two Mantas. “You know, you’d never believe she used to be a librarian,” he said flippantly.

“That so?” Grant replied. “You’d think she’d let us forget once in a while.”

“Ha.” Kane laughed. “She never lets anyone forget anything, isn’t that right, Baptiste?”

Glancing up from the tracking device, Brigid fixed Kane with a disparaging glare before turning back to the readout screen she held in the palm of one hand. Although meant in jest, Kane’s observation touched on a crucial aspect of Brigid’s personality. The woman had what was colloquially known as a photographic memory, or, more accurately, an eidetic one. Brigid could study any image for just a few moments and commit it to memory in vivid detail, with the ability to draw from that memory again and again with total recall.

In her previous career as an archivist in Cobaltville, Brigid’s incredible powers of observation had put her in a critical position during the discovery of a worldwide conspiracy intended to subjugate humankind. Her subsequent work with Kane and Grant at the Cerberus redoubt had been primarily concerned with uncovering and overthrowing that conspiracy in all its many evolving forms. Even now, the presence of the Cerberus trio in the harsh environment of the Antarctic was tangentially related to that far-reaching scheme.

Their boots sank into the thick snow as the three figures trekked away from their Manta craft. Kane glanced back, watching for a moment as the swirling whiteness settled on the still Mantas. The two craft were already dappled with a thin coating of snow, and would doubtless be hard to spot in another hour or so. It struck Kane then that anything could be hidden out here—anything at all—and they might never see it.

Kane dismissed the thought. “Everyone remember where we parked, okay?” he instructed, his tone light. “Baptiste, I’m counting on you here.”

Brigid cast Kane another withering look as she continued to lead the way across the Antarctic wastes. “You think you’re funny,” she said. “Emphasis on ‘think.’”

“Lighten up,” Kane said as he brushed snow from his sleeves. “I’m just trying to keep things cheerful.”

“Oh, you’re very trying,” Brigid snapped. “I’ve had to listen to this blather for the full three-hour trip over here.”

“Really?” Grant asked, unable to hide the note of pity from his tone.

“The first hour was okay,” Brigid assured him. “The second I started wishing we’d found a parallax point so we could jump here instantaneously instead of using the Mantas.” Parallax points formed a hidden network of nodes stretching across the globe and out into other planets that allowed the Cerberus warriors to jump via the quantum ether through use of an alien device called an interphaser. The system allowed for almost instantaneous travel across vast distances, but it relied on specific locations; no parallax point, no interphaser jump.

“What about the third hour?” Kane grumbled.

“Wish I was dead, wish I was dead, wish I was dead,” Brigid muttered, the words streaming into one.