LITMIR.BIZ

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Kinver stepped out of the bright sunlight and into the relative darkness of the two-story administrative building, allowing his remarkable eyes to adjust and letting his other senses assess his new surroundings. Flag was a man unlike any other. His natural senses—smell, hearing, touch and taste, as well as his eyesight—were disciplined to an incredible level of prowess, and he relied upon those senses to sift through great swathes of information that the average man might easily ignore or miss altogether. Abraham Flag maintained the firm belief that every detail might hold a crucial warning, a pivotal fact that would yield its secrets if only one took the time to consider it fully. And unlike most men, Flag was able to consider those facts at lightning speed, such was his prodigious intellect.

      “Where is the artifact?” Flag asked in a voice whose rich timbre both commanded authority and put its listeners at their ease.

      Barnaby spoke up, his voice booming in the corridor as he led the way to a closed door. “The commander gave over an office just through here, Abe,” he explained as he pushed open the door. “We’ve spent the last two days trying to work out what this thing is made of.”

      Flag stood stock-still in the doorway and looked across the room to the artifact. Resting on a work top, surrounded by Barnaby’s notes and a series of spectrographic photographs, was the artifact. It appeared to be a knife, its blade thin but stretching almost the length of a man’s forearm, like the itak machete used by the Filipinos for combat. The blade and hilt appeared to be of a piece, and as Flag stepped closer, he realized that they had been carved of stone. Its surface glistened under the lights of the room, like a polished volcanic stone, and Flag saw indentations all along its surface—writing. He glanced at the writing for a moment, instantly recognizing the ancient characters from a language that dated back several millennia. There appeared to be at least three dozen tiny characters etched into the blade’s surface, and Flag presumed that a similar number would be apparent were he to turn the weapon over.

      Barnaby B. Barnaby spoke up as Flag looked at the weapon. “It’s at least three thousand years old, Professor. I’d estimate maybe five or six thousand years.”

      Flag spoke without looking up from the object on the desk. “What does it say, Ant?”

      Little Ant had already pulled a small notepad from his ill-fitting jacket’s breast pocket, thumbing through its dog-eared pages in anticipation of his ally’s question. “It’s ancient Mesopotamian, Chief,” the famed linguist explained. “There’s quite a lot of it, and there are characters here I don’t even understand, but the essence of it is a war chant, like a song. It says ‘Beware! I am the bringer of Death,’ et cetera.”

      As Little Ant spoke, Abraham Flag reached into his own jacket and produced a pair of white cotton gloves of the thinnest of material, which he then placed over his hands. Wearing the gloves, Flag carefully lifted the stone knife and held it close to his gaze, running his eyes along the writing there. Working in silence, Flag flipped the knife over and scanned the characters along the other side of the blade before speaking once more.

      “A war chant?” he repeated thoughtfully. “Did you find any indication to whom this chant was addressed, or who the owner of the knife might have been?”

      “Nothing like that,” Little Ant admitted, “but I did find one name on it.”

      “A name?” Flag encouraged, his purple-blue eyes flicking up to lock with the linguist’s.

      “‘Godkiller,’” Ant read from his notes. “I think it’s the name of the knife itself.”

      Chapter 2

      Early twenty-third century

       Antarctica

      White on white. That’s what the Antarctic was. That’s all the Antarctic was.

      Grant stood beside the cooling hull of his Manta craft, looking at the monotonous landscape that surrounded him. It was white as far as the eye could see, a freshly laundered sheet, stretching to the north, south, east and west. On closer scrutiny, Grant could make out that here was snow, there was ice and, billowing across it all, tossed about in the currents of the fierce winds, icy flakes of snow and snowy flecks of ice.

      Snow and ice, white on white. Until this moment, Grant, who by any estimation was a well-traveled man, had never appreciated quite how many different gradations of white there could be.

      Grant was a huge man, his skin like polished ebony, with black hair, close-cropped atop his scalp and shaped around his lips in a gunslinger’s mustache. Though he wore a puffy white jacket and pants, there was no disguising his powerful frame. There was a bulky lump on his right sleeve, the only evidence of the hidden sidearm Grant carried there.

      As he turned back to the Manta, somehow relieved to see its obtrusive bronze form amid this white canvas, Grant pulled at the fur-lined hood of his jacket, raising it over his head. He didn’t feel cold, even out here in the arctic chill that was dipping to 40 below, but the wind was howling in his ears like a wolf howling at the moon. The shadow suit Grant wore beneath his jacket helped keep him warm. The shadow suit was a remarkable weave of advanced technology that provided a temperature-controlled environment for its wearer, along with protection against radiation and environmental toxins, as well as some protection from blunt trauma. Despite these incredible properties, the shadow suit was wafer thin, a one-piece bodysuit finished in black that could be easily slipped beneath other clothes. It was like wearing a suit of armor, but with none of the associated restriction of movement.

      As the wind churned up the snow like a flight of doves, Grant stepped into the protective lee of the Manta craft and began to speak, seemingly to no one but himself.

      “Kane?” he said. “I can’t see shit down here. Are you planning on landing anytime soon?”

      Kane’s firm voice came to Grant’s ear a moment later, sounding so clear that he might be standing next to the man in a sheltered room far away from the blizzard’s howling winds. The communications were routed through Commtact units, top-of-the-line communication devices that had been found in Redoubt Yankee years before. The Commtacts featured sensor circuitry incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in the mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing. Theoretically, even a completely deaf wearer would still be able to hear normally, in a fashion, using the Commtact.

      As well as offering radio communications, the units could also be used as translation devices, providing a real-time interpretation of foreign language if sufficient vocabulary had been programmed into their data banks.

      “Cool your jets,” Kane grumbled over the Commtact. “I’m bringing her in now.”

      Before the final syllable of Kane’s proclamation had concluded, Grant saw the dark shadow appear overhead, dipping through the swirling snow, and a moment later the graceful shape of the Manta craft settled on the white blanket of snow beside him.

      The Mantas were alien craft, left on Earth for millennia before being discovered by Grant and Kane during one of their exploratory missions. The beauty of their design was breathtaking, an effortless combination of every principle of aerodynamics wrapped up in a gleaming bronze finish. They had the shape and general configuration of seagoing manta rays, flattened wedges with graceful wings curving out from their bodies. The elongated hump in the center of the craft was the only evidence of a cockpit. The Mantas featured a wingspan of twenty yards, and a body length of almost fifteen feet. Finished in a bronze metallic hue, the surfaces of each craft were decorated with curious geometric designs; elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols that covered the entire body of the aircraft. The Mantas were propelled by two different types of engines—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation air spikes—allowing them flight in the skies and outside of the atmosphere.

      Grant watched as the cockpit to the second Manta opened and two figures stepped out. Like him, both of them were dressed in white, wearing fur-lined jackets and white pants.

      The first figure was

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