Steve White - Forge of the Titans

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Forge of the Titans

THE OLD GODS ARE RETURNING-

AND SOME OF THEM ARE NOT

FRIENDLY!

When Derek Secrest was suddenly pulled out of Naval flight officer school to

take part in a top secret government project involving telepathy—because tests

showed that he had a strong latent talent for psi powers— he thought things

couldn't get weirder. He was wrong.

Soon he was contacted by a mysterious woman who could open portals at will

through spacetime. Her powers seemed godlike—and they were. Millennia ago,

extra-dimensional beings with great powers had come to earth and taken on

human form, remembered in legends as gods and goddesses—and titans, the

ancient enemies of the gods. The godlike beings had driven off the titans, but

now the old enemy is returning, with a new plan to use humans with psionic

abilities to rule the Earth, and not be driven from it this time. And the titans

always did have a fondness for human sacrifice.

Unless Derek and a handful of other telepaths can join forces with the ancient

gods to defeat the titans, the world will be plunged into a new dark age of terror

and death. Even so, judging from mythology, how much can you really trust a

god. . . ?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve White was an officer in Naval Intelligence, and served in the Mediterranean and

the Vietnam War Zone. In addition to the Starfire series with David Weber, he has

written several popular science fiction adventure novels for Baen. They include the

trilogy comprising The Disinherited, Legacy and Debt of Ages, which combine fast-paced

space opera with Arthurian mythology. He has also written the galaxy-spanning

adventure Prince of Sunset, and its sequel Emperor of Dawn. His latest is Eagle Against

the Stars. He currently works for a legal publishing company in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He is married and has three daughters.

Cover painting by David Mattingly

Cover design by Carol Russo Design

Hardcover

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book

are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely

coincidental.

First printing, June 2003

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-7434-3611-3

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

http://www.baen.com

Production by Windhaven Press

Auburn, NH

Electronic version by WebWrights

http://www.webwrights.com

To Sandy, who has her own kind of magic.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In the common tongue of Khron, final vowels are always pronounced—"Quire"

rhymes with "why ray." The next-to-last syllable is normally stressed, with the exception

of words with the "-uo" ending (meaning "people of" and pronounced as "yew-oh"); in

these words, the last syllable before the ending is stressed. Otherwise, readers are on their

own.

Baen Books by Steve White

Forge of the Titans

Eagle Against the Stars

Emperor of Dawn

Prince of Sunset

The Disinherited

Legacy

Debt of Ages

With David Weber

Insurrection

Crusade

In Death Ground

The Shiva Option

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this refreshingly different science fantasy by White (Eagle Against the Stars), Naval

Aviation Officer Candidate Derek Secrest is distressed to be pulled away from flight

training to undergo testing by a top-secret government organization. When the testing

reveals he's a natural telepath, his entire world is turned upside down. An attempt to use

his powers to interdict a terrorist plot succeeds, but the plot's masterminds prove to be

survivors of Greece's Heroic Age, who not only possess technology superior to our own

but also wield magic derived from mass human sacrifices. In addition, they're in league

with the malevolent beings known to us through myth as the Titans. Derek and his

telepathic friends join the opposition, including the gods of Olympus, who are themselves

shaken by the discovery that psionic humans possess abilities beyond both god and

magician. The basic plot device-that of evil alien gods who once possessed our world

trying to regain a foothold-suggests a Lovecraftian horror, but beyond some lip service

about the intradimensional realms controlled by the Titans inducing madness, there's an

optimism, if not a teleological evangelism, about humans' place in the cosmos that recalls

the best of the John Campbell era of SF. White's core audience of hard SF fans will be

pleased, as will fantasy readers who enjoy convincing explanations of how such things as

magic and psi powers work.

Forge of the Titans

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

In Virginia, summer is the only reliable season: you know it's going to be hot and

humid.

Otherwise . . . well, Derek Secrest's boyhood recollections of winter included

Christmas days outdoors in shirtsleeves, but also of freezing his butt off shoveling two

feet of blizzard out from around his dad's car in latitudes where you weren't supposed to

need a garage except perhaps as a glorified tool shed. Likewise, spring and autumn could

be a damp misery of drizzly chill that lent the tourist ads every quality of a joke except

humor.

But sometimes those ads told the truth—and less than the truth. Autumn really could

fulfill all the promise of Indian summer for a few days when old memories crowded

around and you wanted time to stand still. And spring, at its best, seemed to justify the

universe by sheer, throat-hurting beauty.

Today was that kind of day: past the full glory of azaleas and dogwoods, for this was

mid-May, but still partaking of that fragile, fleeting perfection.

So, wondered Derek with twenty-two-year-old impatience, what the hell am I doing

indoors?

He knew the official answer, the reason they'd given him when he'd been ordered up

here from Pensacola: research. It told him precisely nothing. As far as he could see, the

only research he was doing was determining experimentally whether it was possible to be

literally bored to death.

Cruelly, he could even glimpse the gorgeous day through the window of the waiting

room where he sat—and sat, and sat—with an assortment of other uniformed people. It

would have been a lovely view if he'd been in the mood to appreciate it. Not all of the

northern Virginia landscape had vanished under endless rows of gratuitously

undistinguished townhouses containing government employees who hadn't yet stolen

enough of the taxpayers' money to afford something more pretentious. And this

installation, to which he'd been bused after landing at Andrews Air Force Base across the

Potomac, was pretty out of the way. In fact, he wasn't clear on just exactly where it

was—and this was not unfamiliar territory to him. Curious.

Actually, there was a lot that was curious about this whole business. Naval Aviation

Officer Candidates like himself were used to participating in experiments on a voluntary

basis—really voluntary, for there was never any shortage of volunteers. Why should

there be? As long as you were sitting at a keyboard performing some routine task as fast

as you could while occasionally being stung by a harmless but irritating electric shock, or

doing something else equally idiotic, you at least weren't getting yelled at by your drill

instructor.

This time, though, they hadn't asked for volunteers. . . .

The outside door of the waiting room opened, derailing Derek's train of thought. He

had to fight his impulse to stand up and come to attention, for the man who entered wore

Navy short-sleeved whites like himself—but with the two gold stripes of a full lieutenant

on his shoulder boards, rather than the tiny gold anchor that adorned Derek's. You're not

at Pensacola, dummy! he reminded himself. And this guy doesn't work for Training

Command.

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