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After the end
Humanity has been held in subjugation for thousands of years, manipulated by a cruel alien race. But what began as a game among self-styled gods evolved into an internecine power play. Divided by ego and greed, the enemy faced resistance—and a reckoning—from an intrepid group of human rebels. But now the Cerberus operation lies in disarray, its members missing or broken, even as the Annunaki threat is reborn in a new and more horrifying form.
The God Machine
Enlil, cruelest of them all, is set to revive the sadistic pantheon that will rule the Earth. Based in his vast Dragon City, Enlil plans to create infinite gods—at the cost of humankind. With the Cerberus team at its lowest ebb, can they possibly stop his twisted plan? Or are they, too, destined to be absorbed by the God Machine?
Hassood simply wasn’t anymore. Where he had been there was only the dark outline of his shape
“What the…?” Grant muttered, staring at the screen as it locked on a fixed image of the wall with the stain that had been Hassood marked on its surface.
Grant turned back to his colleagues, the four of them as transfixed by the screen as he had been.
“What happened?” Domi asked. “It didn’t make sense.”
Grant was about to answer when, in the moonlight that seeped into the roofed passage, he saw silvery lines cutting the air, winking on and off like Christmas lights. From the screen behind him, Grant heard his own voice echoing back with barely restrained urgency. “Hassood?” it said. “Hassood? Come in.”
He watched as another of those silvery lines cut through the air around them, like a knife caught in the moonlight. It was water, pouring from the roof above them, dripping down to the floor where they stood.
“They’re made of water,” he declared, “and they’re here.”
As he said it, Rosalia’s dog began to bark. Something was taking shape behind its mistress.
Dragon City
James Axler
“They’re dragons now, and that’s that. Normality has shifted to accommodate it.”
—Charlie Brooker, The Guardian,
2006
“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”
—Adolf Hitler, 1889–1945
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 influ-ences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.
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