God War by James Axler Read Free Book Online Page A

the rift expanded, those twin cones spreading up from a central point at ground level, like some incredible hourglass poised in the air. For a moment it simply stood there, uncanny colors swirling in its depths. And then, even as Grant’s team struggled to take in what they were looking at, the rift in space began to disgorge hundreds upon hundreds of people, each one walking in step from its impossible depths like some incredible army. Striding at the head of that army was the unique stone figure of Ullikummis, the magmalike veins trailing across his body with a fierce, red-gold glow. Grant recognized someone else, too, walking purposefully just beside the ancient stone god—it was the unmistakable figure of missing Cerberus operative Brigid Baptiste, her red-gold hair in sympathy with those glowing strands of lava that crisscrossed Ullikummis’s frame.
    Distantly, Grant was aware of Bry’s words trailing off over the Commtact receiver and he engaged the microphone pickup. “Thanks for the heads-up, Donald,” he said. “We see it. And it ain’t pretty.”

Chapter 3
    Some fifteen minutes earlier, the temporary Cerberus ops room had come to excited life as a communication was received from Kane. Accompanied by an old ally of the Cerberus team, Kane revealed that he had finally discovered the location of Bensalem, the fortress island that Ullikummis had designated his headquarters.
    The Cerberus operation was connected to the external world via a web of communication and surveillance devices, the core of which was made up of two satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit. Cerberus employed concealed uplinks that chattered continuously with these orbiting satellites to provide much of the empirical data its operatives relied upon. Gaining access to the satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists at the original Cerberus redoubt. Now the Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from an orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat.
    Speaking in real time to Kane, Brewster Philboyd accessed the reconnaissance satellite to track his position. Aged somewhere in his midforties, Brewster Philboyd was a long-serving Cerberus desk jockey. His lanky six-foot frame seemed hunched as he sat at the laptop and fed information to the satellite following Kane’s instruction. Philboyd had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other Moon exiles about two years earlier, and had proved to be a valuable addition to the staff. His dogged determination to find the cause of a problem or uncover the basic workings of a system had helped reveal the operating secrets of the interphaser. While he wasn’t a fighter, Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when he was faced with a scientific or engineering problem.
    As Brewster worked, Donald Bry took over the communication feed, discussing the situation with Kane. As he spoke, Lakesh walked into the sunny back room that had been transformed into the operations center.
    Lakesh was not a tall man, but he stood with a regal bearing. He had dusky skin, thick black hair with slight hints of white at the temples and above the ears, and a refined mouth beneath an aquiline nose. He looked to be a man of perhaps fifty years of age, but in fact Lakesh was far older. Having spent more than a century in cryogenic suspension, Lakesh was truthfully a man of 250 years of age, and until quite recently he had looked to be exactly that. A contrivance of circumstances had served to allow Lakesh to renegotiate his age, bringing him back to a healthy fifty-something after a period of accelerated decrepitude. A physicist and cybernetics authority, Lakesh had been present when the U.S. military had first begun testing the mat-trans system. Not given to panic, Lakesh provided leadership that formed a calm center around which the Cerberus operation rotated.
    “What has happened?” Lakesh asked, having heard the raised voices as he approached