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NEW ORDER
Centuries beyond the aftermath of a shattered earth, the aeons-old manipulation of humanity has brought forth a new chrysalis of star-born domination. His name is Ullikummis, exiled scion of an embattled but brilliant and calculating inhuman race. Now, his influence and mind control has spread like a contagion, capturing innocent minds in a flood of cruel, false salvation as his tidal wave of power sweeps across the planet.
SECRET HISTORY
With their headquarters destroyed and their greatest asset, archivist Brigid Baptiste, lost to the manipulation of the enemy, Kane and the elite Cerberus Rebels are losing the battle—but not yet the war. As Kane succumbs to incapacitating hallucinations, Brigid’s dark avatar lays siege to the final piece of her Stone God’s plot: a very special child, who is the secret link to a ghastly pantheon of despotic rule.
The girl was human in appearance and not yet three years old.
Wearing an indigo-colored one-piece suit and carrying a rag doll with red hair and a dress that matched the child’s clothing exactly. The girl had snow-blond hair hanging loosely to past her shoulders, and her large, blue eyes were wide with excitement. Behind her, another figure strode at a more languid pace, shorter than a man with grayish-pink skin and a bulbous, hairless head. Two huge, upslanting eyes dominated his scrunched-up face, black watery pools like the bottom of two wells lost in shadow. Beneath these, twin nares lay flat where a man’s nose would protrude, and a small slit of mouth held the faintest expression of pleasure, the corners turned up infinitesimally.
“Briggly,” the little girl said, laughing as she ran up to the woman in the black leather armor.
Brigid knelt on the floor, stretching her arms wide to clasp the girl and pull her toward her.
“Welcome, Brigid Baptiste,” the gray-skinned creature acknowledged from behind the little girl.
It was all so easy.
Outlanders: Planet Hate
James Axler
Fire will burn itself out if it does not find anything to burn.
—Arab proverb
I have not yet begun to fight!
—John Paul Jones
1747–1792
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 influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.
Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.
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