James Axler - Planet Hate

NEW ORDER

Centuries beyond the aftermath of a shattered earth, the aeons-old manipulation of humanity has brought forth a new chrysalis of star-born domination. His name is Ullikummis, exiled scion of an embattled but brilliant and calculating inhuman race. Now, his influence and mind control has spread like a contagion, capturing innocent minds in a flood of cruel, false salvation as his tidal wave of power sweeps across the planet.

SECRET HISTORY

With their headquarters destroyed and their greatest asset, archivist Brigid Baptiste, lost to the manipulation of the enemy, Kane and the elite Cerberus Rebels are losing the battle—but not yet the war. As Kane succumbs to incapacitating hallucinations, Brigid’s dark avatar lays siege to the final piece of her Stone God’s plot: a very special child, who is the secret link to a ghastly pantheon of despotic rule.

The girl was human in appearance and not yet three years old.

Wearing an indigo-colored one-piece suit and carrying a rag doll with red hair and a dress that matched the child’s clothing exactly. The girl had snow-blond hair hanging loosely to past her shoulders, and her large, blue eyes were wide with excitement. Behind her, another figure strode at a more languid pace, shorter than a man with grayish-pink skin and a bulbous, hairless head. Two huge, upslanting eyes dominated his scrunched-up face, black watery pools like the bottom of two wells lost in shadow. Beneath these, twin nares lay flat where a man’s nose would protrude, and a small slit of mouth held the faintest expression of pleasure, the corners turned up infinitesimally.

“Briggly,” the little girl said, laughing as she ran up to the woman in the black leather armor.

Brigid knelt on the floor, stretching her arms wide to clasp the girl and pull her toward her.

“Welcome, Brigid Baptiste,” the gray-skinned creature acknowledged from behind the little girl.

It was all so easy.

Outlanders: Planet Hate

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Fire will burn itself out if it does not find anything to burn.

—Arab proverb

I have not yet begun to fight!

—John Paul Jones

1747–1792

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.

Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.

Contents

Prologue

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

Prologue

Altyn Tagh region, Tibet

The redhead came to the farmhouse under the flag of truce. A Caucasian woman riding a powerful steed, she had wrapped her fur cloak tightly around her against the biting winds that cascaded down from the imposing peaks of Altyn Tagh. Svelte and beautiful, the flame-haired woman looked exhausted from her long trek through this, the most desolate part of Tibet.

Kamala watched the redhead’s approach as she worked in her father’s field, repairing the broken stake that held the old scarecrow in place. A willowy girl, barely thirteen summers old, Kamala had met with few strangers from outside the village, just the occasional traveling salesman and the traders on market day or the silent monks from the nearby monastery who merely nodded as they went about their business. Kamala had long dark hair and brown eyes, and her sun-bronzed limbs had become long and gangly following the first flush of puberty, yet the rest of her body bided its time, in no rush to catch up. One day, perhaps, she might be beautiful like her mother, Bayarmaz, but for now she seemed awkward, all flailing limbs and sharp elbows and knees.

Looking up as she bound the jagged struts of wood together, Kamala had noticed the distant rider making her slow approach to their family homestead some five hundred miles north of Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet. The setting sun stretched the visitor’s shadow far across the golden wheat fields, making of it a sinister, skeletal thing like the scarecrow Kamala toiled with.

She looked to the east, spying the blind eye of the moon as it nudged over the horizon to take up its vigil in the cold evening sky as the sun set in the west. When she looked back, the flame-haired rider was closer and she could make out the glinting metal of her weapons, a gun resting between her legs as the horse jostled slowly along the frost-spattered path, a metal dirk sheathed at her hip. By the time Kamala had finished her repairs, the beautiful woman had dismounted her horse, secured it outside her parents’ simple lodgings and disappeared inside.