James Axler - Outlanders 26 - Sea of Plague

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Grant crossed "That's appare

eventually conl___________

and homo superior. Both new and old humans are in the same boat—marked to be ruled or destroyed."

Baron Sharpe's eyes clouded over with the intensity of his emotion. "Academically, I can see a certain logic

to it. If the control mechanisms are installed at key points throughout history, then the nukecaust will not be

necessary."

Quietly Brigid said, "I know we've dropped a lot on you. Some of our claims are very wild and impossible to

prove. The final decision as to whether we're right or wrong is up to you."

Baron Sharpe blinked, then his eyes frosted hard. "What do you expect me to do?"

"Spread the word to ail the other barons," Brigid answered. "Form a consortium of barons and pool your

resources to occupy Area Fifty-one. Do whatever you have to do to fight the future, to keep the Imperator's

adaptive Earth from coming to pass."

"And what of you?"

"We have our own fronts to fight on," Grant responded brusquely.

Other titles in this series:

Exile to Hell Destiny Run Savage Sun Omega Path Parallax Red Doomstar Relic Iceblood Hellhound Fury Night Eternal

Outer Darkness Armageddon Axis Wreath of Fire Shadow Scourge Hell Rising Doom Dynasty Tigers of Heaven

Purgatory Road Sargasso Plunder Tomb of Time Prodigal Chalice Devil in the Moon Dragoneye Far Empire Equinox

Zero Talon and Fang

James Ruler

Out anders

TTT

SEA OF PLAGUE

A COLD EAGLE BOOK FROM

WORLDWIDE

TORONTO • NEW VORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN MADRID • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as

"unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this

"stripped book."

First edition August 2003

ISBN 0-373-63839-6

SEA OF PLAGUE

form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography,

photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written

permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever

to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or

unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

® and TM are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and

Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries. Printed in U.S.A.

SEA OF PLAGUE

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

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of

Cobaltvilie, 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, Cobaltviile'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.

Prologue

The Xian Pyramid, Central China

Sam, the imperator, turned slightly toward the hel-meted guard standing just outside the balcony.

Instantly the uniformed man stepped forward, hefting his SIG-AMT rifle. His boots, coveralls and helmet

were midnight blue with a facing of bright scarlet. A batonlike club hung from his belt.

In sharp contrast to the soldier's garb, Sam's tall figure was draped in an impeccably tailored white linen

suit. It seemed to shimmer in the borealis-like nimbus exuded by the Heart of the World fifty feet below

the balcony. Underlit by its lambent glow, Sam resembled a specter.

Sam was so exceptionally lean, he looked like a poster child for anorexia. His hollowed-out cheeks

stressed his high, jutting cheekbones. He had no facial hair to speak of, not even eyebrows. Beneath the

brow arches, sunken very deep in his head, as if hiding from the light, haughty golden eyes shone like

polished ingots. Below the crag of brows and probing eyes, his face seemed to taper down like a

teardrop. A sharp, narrow nose and a long, thin mouth that never curved far from a straight line

completed the face.

10 JAMES AXLER

A white turban covered the top and sides of his head, and light glinted from the blue diamond broach

pinned at the turban's forefront. The subtle slant of his golden eyes beneath the prominent supraorbital

ridges gave his pale skin a vaguely Asian cast.

His hands were inhumanly long and slender, but the backs and palms were crisscrossed with a network

of deep lines like those of a very old man. Yet judging by his smooth, unlined face, Sam could be no

more than twenty years old.

Kane pretended not to notice the summons to the guard. He kept his bearded face blank of expression,

even when he felt his shoulder-length hair stirring from the static discharge due to the energy field

surrounding the Heart of the World. His flesh prickled as if thousands of ants were crawling over every

inch of his skin.

He, Sindri, Sam and Tanvirah stood upon a railed balcony that encircled a vast circular chamber more

than two hundred feet across. Positioned all around the balcony were arrays of consoles, power

conduits, displays, switchboards and computer terminals. Some fifty feet below, in the center of the

chamber, yawned what appeared to be a pit or a pool. On closer inspection, the pit looked more like a

sphere of dense black, its obsidian surface dotted with pinpoints of intense light. A swirl of white

vaporous dust formed a long, sweeping curve that cut through the center of the black mass.

The black mass wasn't solid, nor was it liquid. It gave the impression of being utterly empty, and yet it

was sprinkled with a multitude of tiny sparks shin-

Sea of Plague

ing and glowing within it. There was the impression of motion, as if each spark were moving and as if the

central spiral misty mass slowly revolved, each glittering facet of it alive and fighting against the

eye-hurting blackness—which, according to Sam, was not so much blackness as the complete absence

of color. It was a deep emptiness, a total lack of existence.

The pool lay at the bottom and precise center of the twelve-hundred-foot-tall Pyramid of Xian, the

largest megalithic structure ever found on Earth. No one really knew who had constructed it or precisely

when, but apparently it had been built to protect the Heart of the World.

Many years before, Sam had described the pool as a nexus point, a convergence depot of geomagnetic

energy, from which a hub of ley lines spread outward across the planet. Now, after Sam had altered it

with technology, he referred to the center of Earth energies as the microcosmos, penetrating the

space-time continuum. The pool contained a slice view of the universe, compressed and condensed,

visible through a dimensional window he had created.

Only moments before, Kane had been rooted to the spot by terror at the very concept of the power at

Sam's command. He claimed he could enter the coordinates of a particular point in space or even a time

period and inject whatever elements he chose. It was the final component in what he referred to as the

Great Plan, a dream to create and then control all of reality.

If dwarfish Sindri was intimidated by Sam's casual proclamation of guiding human destiny, he gave no

12 JAMES AXLER

sign of it. Nodding toward Kane, Sindri impatiently said to Sam, "You didn't answer his question about

the plague."

Sam sighed. "It's not quite the horrible genocidal act you might think it is. I merely borrowed a few

lessons from history. When a disease ravages a society, economics shatter, poverty moves in and trust in

governments and fellow human beings dissolves."

"Not to mention," Kane said darkly, "new mes-siahs and messengers from God emerge from the chaos,

especially if some kind of religious prophecies were apparently fulfilled during the plague times."

Sam gave him a fleeting, appreciative smile. "Exactly. In the Middle Ages, a century of progress was

brought to a crashing halt by simultaneous outbreaks of the bubonic plague. When I inject my own virus

into the various key points of time and place, I will effect changes just as major...but the nukecaust will

be avoided because the circumstances that led up to it will have been averted.

' 'There will be waste, of course, and that is to be deplored, but the plague victims will be mostly from

the underclass of the stricken societies who contribute the least."

"The useless eaters," Kane drawled. "That old saw."

Sam chuckled. "But I want you, Kane, to be part of the Great Plan—especially as it moves into its final

phase. If you're my ally, the temporal-ripple backlash will be minimized. I will give you whatever you

want. Just name it."

Sea of Plague

Kane forced a contemptuous smirk to his face. "Can you give me back Brigid?"

When Sam's smile faltered, Kane stated, "What I want is not within your power to give. And even if you

tried to convince me that it was, all you'd do is hold the possibility of returning her to me over my head

like a sword."

Sam began clicking the memory cards together again. ' 'Then what can I do for you?''

Kane shrugged. "There are some questions you can answer, suspicions I've harbored for many years

that you can confirm or deny. I'd like to find out why you financed the Nirodha movement...what the

significance of the entire Scorpia Prime alter ego and Tan-trie sex deal was all about."

Sam opened his mouth as if to reply, but Kane held up a hand. "But as much as I'd like to know those

things, the fate of human civilization, maybe even of all humanity, rests with me. That's not something I

ever bargained for. But I've come to accept it, and I'll do what I can."

Kane moved with the blinding speed and the controlled explosion of near superhuman reflexes that had

been his as a younger man. He hurled himself forward, shoulder-rolling between Tanvirah and Sam. He

caught a glimpse of fearful desperation on the face of the soldier when the man realized he was Kane's

objective.

He tried to bring his autorifle to bear, but Kane rose smoothly to his feet right in front of him. The edge

of his left hand lashed out, catching the man full across the neck. There was a mushy snap, as of a stick

14 JAMES AXLER

of wet wood breaking, and the red-and-blue-garbed trooper dropped dead after uttering only one

choked cry.

Kane tried to wrestle the weapon out of the man's hands as he sagged, but they had reflexively tightened

around it and he had no time to wrest it from his grip. He caught a blur of movement from behind him.

Tan-virah launched an expert kick at his back, and he twisted aside, taking the impact on his hip.

Pain shivered through him, but if her foot had struck solidly where it had been aimed, the impact would

have cracked his spine. She wore knee-length stilt-heeled boots, and he already knew she could use

them to kill him. The girl was a master of unarmed combat, as skilled as any opponent he had ever met.

Tanvirah's face was full cheeked and bold nosed, her skin the rich brown of coffee and milk, her eyes

large and black and flashing with fury.

Her sleek, straight hair was a thick, ebony cascade sheening over her shoulders from a part in the middle

of her scalp. She wore a black-and-red uniform ensemble, the colors of the imperial forces. The pants

hugged her long, lithe legs, and her waist was tightly cinctured by a red sash. The narrow shoulders of

her satiny black tunic were lifted by tapered pads.

The fabric was tailored to conform to the thrust of her full breasts, a goodly portion of them visible due

to the tunic's plunging neckline. It revealed not only the smooth sweep of cleavage, but also a silver

medallion in the shape of a scorpion.

Kane kept twisting, reaching out for the astonished Sam, putting the imperator between him and Tanvi-

Sea of Plague

rah. She had started to launch another kick but checked the movement, shrieking in frustration. She

stumbled off balance, and Sindri chose that moment to cannonball his small body into her legs. She fell

heavily, and Sindri leaped atop her. Kane knew from painful experience that despite his

three-and-a-half-foot height, Sindri was far stronger than he looked.

Sam tried to contort himself out of Kane's grasp, twisting and turning wildly. Kane turned with him,

locking the man's left arm under his right and heaving up on it. Sam's lips writhed over his teeth in a

grimace of pain. His nerve-numbed fingers opened and dropped the data cards.

Kane caught them, snatching them out of the air. Maintaining the pressure on the captured arm, he

forced Sam down on the floor grille. "Stay there, messiah," he snapped. To show he meant business, he

drove his knee into Sam's pointed chin, slamming him hard against the metal floor plates.

He whirled toward the computer consoles, noting as he did so that Tanvirah and Sindri were locked in

thrashing, cursing combat. He swept his eyes across the machines and saw with a surge of relief that they

were all networked. Swiftly, he inserted the cards in the proper ports, praying they could be read.

Within a few seconds—which felt like a chain of interlocking eternities to Kane—symbols indicating the

cards had been successfully uploaded flashed on the monitor screens. Kane then began inputting the

spatiotemporal injection coordinates into the keyboards.

16 JAMES AXLER

Even he was amazed by how swiftly and surely he moved. "Sindri!" he yelled. "Get over here!"

A hand suddenly closed around Kane's shoulder from behind. Fingers dug in deep, seeming to puncture

flesh, muscle and bone. He was too engulfed by the pain even to cry out. Then a force hauled him

violently away from the keyboards.

He didn't fall, but he staggered nearly the entire breadth of the circular walkway. He saw Sindri lying on

his face, breathing hard with Tanvirah kneeling on his back, holding both of his arms in hammerlocks.

And he saw Sam, the imperator, saunter toward him, carrying himself with the completely confident

manner of a lion approaching its prey.

"You are such a fool," he said. "I was your salvation, your only hope and you threw it all away." He

shook his head in pity. "All away."

Kane leaped at Sam in a dropkick, throwing all of his weight against the tall, slender man. Both feet

impacted against Sam's chest, but he merely took two stumbling steps back while Kane fell heavily on

his back.

Before he could rise, Sam sidled in and caught hold of the back of his neck and squeezed. Kane choked

off a scream of agony. The sensation was like being trapped between the jaws of a hydraulic bear trap.

He tried but failed to prize Sam's fingers apart. Then he pistoned his fists into Sam's midsection as the

imperator lifted him clear of the balcony's floor and twisted him around so they were face-to-face.

' 'You want to know why you were really implanted with the SQUID?" Sam asked pleasantly. The pupils

Sea of Plague

of his eyes suddenly sparked with a familiar crimson glow, like pinpoints of fire.

Agony overtook Kane. He screamed in mindless pain and fury. Forgetting Sindri, even Tanvirah, he

bellowed an animal wail of rage and pain, cursing the sleet storm of hot coals that seemed to fill the

inside of his skull. He was unable to form words or even to think a single cogent thought.

When Sam released him, Kane fell limply onto the floor plates, writhing and twitching feebly. The

im-perator toed him onto his back, and Kane gazed up at him blankly, his nervous system overwhelmed.

Sam reached up and pulled off his turban—revealing a naked cranium peeled clean of flesh, the skull

bone open to the air. Sprouting from it was a series of tiny electrodes, studding it in an orderly pattern.

Between the electrodes stretched flat ribbons of circuitry.

In a gentle tone barely above a whisper, he said, "That's why you were implanted, Kane...just like

everyone will be one day...so we will be unified and I never need be alone again. No one will ever be

alone again. All the units—the human brains in the world— will be linked to me. Chains, enabling my

mind to take over that of another, to influence, to guide, to control in almost total assimilation."

The pain in his head ebbed sufficiently so Kane could move and think again. "That's a very old dream,"

he muttered.

"Yes," Sam agreed. "Many others attempted what I have. But they never completely realized their dream

of an orderly world, a controllable and unified universe. Until now."

18 JAMES AXLER

Kane managed to shamble to a half crouch. Sam negligently drove a knee into his face. He heard and

felt his nose cartilage collapse under the impact, and he fell over on his side. The pain was nothing

compared to what he had experienced from the superconducting quantum interface device, the SQUID.

"Time will expand my horizons and build on the accomplishments of my predecessors," Sam continued.

"Predecessors?" Kane croaked, slowly trying to climb to his feet again.

Sam grinned, a very human grin, made horrific and macabre by his fleshless cranial bone. "Surely you've

figured it out by now, Kane. Remember what I told you a long, long time ago in another place

altogether."

Kane wiped at the blood threading his face and tottered erect. He knew now who Sam really was. The

imperator had confirmed suspicions he had secretly harbored but dared not even consciously examine

for many years.

"I remember," Kane husked out. "You said that you're a program, not an individual entity." He made a

statement; he didn't ask a question.

Sam started to nod—then cried out more in shock than pain when Sindri struck him from behind with

the truncheon taken from the guard's body. He had performed a truly prodigious leap in order to do it.

Sparks flew in a shower from the top of Sam's head.

Sam staggered forward—directly into Kane's left fist. Kane glimpsed Tanvirah grabbing Sindri and

hauling him down to the floor, then a fountain of

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摘要：

Grantcrossed"That'sappareeventuallyconl___________andhomosuperior.Bothnewandoldhumansareinthesameboat—markedtoberuledordestroyed."BaronSharpe'seyescloudedoverwiththeintensityofhisemotion."Academically,Icanseeacertainlogictoit.Ifthecontrolmechanismsareinstalledatkeypointsthroughouthistory,thenthenuke...

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James Axler - Outlanders 26 - Sea of Plague

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