James Axler - God War

CROSS FIRE OF THE IMMORTALS

The Annunaki, a power-hungry and hate-driven alien race, have returned to take over Earth. This time, permanently. And the hard-core human rebels who fought to repel these self-proclaimed gods have paid a terrible price. Just when they are needed most—as the postapocalyptic threat surges to terrifying new levels—the Cerberus operation lies broken, its key members missing.

PROGENY OF HATE

Ullikummis has chosen Earth as ground zero for a terrifying family reunion. A son born of cruelty, genetic manipulation and infinite power, for 4,000 years the stone god has waited, plotting his revenge against his father, Enlil, the most sadistic of the Annunaki. As father and child unleash their armies in a clash of titanic proportions, the bravest of the rebels, Kane, is humanity’s last hope to halt this deadly war of the gods. Endgame has finally arrived...but who will be the winner?

Another Annunaki was out there

The mother ship had detected his presence immediately, identified him as one of her children.

“Ullikummis,” Enlil muttered, the name lost in the sharp intake of his breath. “So you have returned, my son.”

It should have been impossible, Enlil knew. He had expelled his child into space, sent him to float among the stars for the duration of his near-endless life. And yet here he stood on Earth once again, and with an army of apekin at his beck and call.

But Enlil did not question the facts presented to him. Ullikummis had beaten the odds and returned, and that was only right because he was his son—and what would any son of Enlil be if he could not defy the odds?

Tapping a quick sequence out on the palm link to Tiamat, Enlil called forth the Igigi who hid within the shells of the reborn Annunaki. “We still have much to do.” He spoke to the empty room as if reminding himself. “More than I conceived. Let us begin.”

Tiamat trembled as her mighty cargo doors opened for the very first time.

God War

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

There is undoubtedly something religious about it: everyone believes that they are special, that they are chosen, that they have a special relationship with fate. Here is the test: you turn over card after card to see in which way that is true. If you can defy the odds, you may be saved. And when you are cleaned out, the last penny gone, you are enlightened at last, free perhaps, exhilarated like an ascetic by the falling away of the material world.

—Andrei Codrescu

1946–

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

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 1

It was a little after dawn in Luilekkerville on the West Coast of what used to be known as the United States of America. The morning air still fresh and cool against his face, Minister Morrow rubbed his hand over his clean-shaved jaw and looked up at the golden ball of the sun as it rose over the cathedral. Placed in the exact center of the ville, the cathedral towered over the buildings around it, dominating the skyline.

The ville itself had the air of a construction site, half-built edifices poised along the straight streets, as if patiently waiting in line for their builders to return after a good night’s sleep. So much had changed here since the days when this walled settlement had first grown up from the ashes of bombed-out Snakefishville. Back when it had been ruled by Baron Snakefish, the gates had been kept locked, the high walls patrolled by the Magistrates. Those were things of the past now. These days, under its new and hopeful name, Luilekkerville’s gates were ever open, the new Magistrates welcoming all visitors that they might perhaps join the congregation. Minister Morrow took heart in that, feeling in part responsible thanks to his imparting of firm moral guidance to the newcomers to the ville, encouraging the work ethic that had seen so much rebuilding over the ruins of the old.

A balding middle-aged man with ruddy cheeks and a square face, Morrow was dressed in his simple robes of office: a fustian cassock with a wide hood that could be pulled forward to hide his face in shadow. He was an Alpha, first priest in the New Order that had dedicated itself to a better world under the stone god who had returned from Heaven to spread his message of peace. The god’s name was Ullikummis, but that hardly mattered. What he brought—what he was even now in the process of bringing—was utopia, Heaven on Earth.