Arisen: Death of Empires Read online

  ARISEN

  Hope Never Dies.

  First published 2014 by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs

  London, UK

  Copyright © Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs

  The right of Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the authors. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  About the Authors

  GLYNN JAMES, born in Wellingborough, England in 1972, is a bestselling author of dark sci-fi novels. He has an obsession with anything to do with zombies, Cthulhu mythos, and post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and films, all of which began when he started reading HP Lovecraft and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend back when he was eight years old. In addition to co-authoring the bestselling ARISEN books (over 100,000 copies sold), he is the author of the bestselling DIARY OF THE DISPLACED series. More info on his writing and projects can be found at www.glynnjames.co.uk.

  About the Authors

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS, in addition to co-authoring the bestselling ARISEN series (over 100,000 copies sold), wrote the bestselling prequel ARISEN : GENESIS. He is also author of the D-BOYS series of high-concept, high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2015); as well as the acclaimed existential cyberthrillers THE MANUSCRIPT and PANDORA’S SISTERS, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation). He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge.

  ARISEN

  BOOK SEVEN

  DEATH OF EMPIRES

  GLYNN JAMES &

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

  “Here life has death for neighbour,

  And far from eye or ear

  Wan waves and wet winds labour,

  Weak ships and spirits steer”

  – Algernon Charles Swinburne,

  “The Garden of Proserpine”

  “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

  – Ernest Hemingway,

  The Old Man and the Sea

  If I Should Wake Before I Die (ii)

  The USS John F. Kennedy

  Night.

  Breathless, frozen in place, Juice looks wide-eyed upon the ocean of dead that now stretches to the front edge of the carrier, and then out beyond it, to the horizon, and then on past the very curvature of the Earth.

  In the immediate foreground, he can see the flight deck heaving with these undead killers. Beyond that, they spill off the prow into the shallows, and then in struggling and cresting waves back up onto the beach, and then across the dunes, and finally onto the land itself – across three thousand miles of a great, lost, dead continent.

  Juice knows the population of North America at the time of the fall was 600 million. And now its population is zero. Or so close as makes no difference.

  To either side of him stand his brothers, those in Alpha, and others in MARSOC. They are waiting for the signal. They are all staring down the barrel of an entire five-acre supercarrier flight deck heaving with dead. In a few seconds, the weak and tiny handful of them are going to have to fight their way through this, straight into the middle of that uncountable, irreducible horde.

  They are going forward to try to reinforce the blasted-out hole in the starboard side of the ship, and relieve its beleaguered defenders – the ones who are being sacrificed, and taken down mercilessly, and cannot long hold. Soon all those people will be dead, and soon after that, so will every other living soul aboard the ship – and not long after, so too will go out the last flickering flames of life on Earth.

  Juice and his brothers are waiting for the signal.

  They are waiting to go to their deaths.

  Whatever it was that saved him and his teammates before, that averted the need for their last-ditch suicide mission, it isn’t happening this time around. This time, they have to go.

  There is no way out.

  Unable to bear thinking about this terrible fact, Juice looks down instead at his weapon – his beloved SIG assault rifle. He grips the bolt handle, eases back the action, and chamber-checks that a round is still seated. He drops the mag and checks that. Because, very soon, it is going to be just him and this rifle.

  Soon everyone else will be dead.

  He looks to either side of him. The other survivors of Alpha are still there, as well as a handful of Fick’s remaining Marines. But somehow Juice knows they will all soon fall away, taken down one by one, finally leaving him alone and naked. It is only a matter of time. It is as inevitable, and inexorable, as the falling of a hammer.

  And then, finally, that hammer will fall on him.

  * * *

  Jerking awake, the sheet soaked with sweat and sticking to his skin, Juice still didn’t make a sound. This was from long habit, of so often coming awake on hostile ground, or on covert ops. But it certainly didn’t matter here. The compartment he slept in was alive with a buzzing, rumbling, all-consuming racket. That was Predator snoring on the bunk beneath him.

  And Juice had never in life heard such a lovely sound. It meant two things: One, he wasn’t about to die. And, two, he wasn’t alone. He made a silent pledge that, having been given these two priceless blessings, he would never wish for anything ever again.

  As he lay awake, struggling to get his breathing back to normal after the manic dream, the cool air drying his sweat, he paused to wonder why he and Pred were in the same stacked bunk beds, on the same damned side of the room. One of their two former cabin-mates, Handon, had gone off to shack up with the survivalist woman. And Captain Ainsley, of course, had gone on to his reward – which Juice ardently hoped was an awesome one.

  Because God knew the man deserved it.

  In a way, Juice envied him. In truth, and as his teammates would be surprised to learn, Juice was tired.

  He was tired, and hurting, and wounded, and exhausted in his soul. Even after a couple of days of recovery from their impossible mission in North America, and the Battle of the JFK, he still felt utterly depleted.

  Like there was nothing left in the tank.

  But he also knew this problem had the same solution it always did. Simply, he had to break through – yet again. It was always about the same thing: resolve to carry on.

  Coming up through the ranks of U.S. Army Special Forces, Juice had always been told: “You have to never give up. No matter what.” And he’d believed that. Moreover, he believed he’d got it – that his resolve was unquestionable, that he would never quit, and that nothing could stop him. He had done everything ever asked of him, and getting to his level had required near superhuman resilience and resolve – resilience to all difficulties, and resolve to never quit.

  But, ultimately, it turned out that those deceptively simple words were a lot heavier than he ever could have imagined. Because what they don’t tell you is: even after you had not given up, many times, and yet not a damned thing had come of it… you have to not give up
all over again. Then you had to do it again, and again – long after you thought you’d already checked that one off.

  Maybe long after all your strength was gone.

  For over two years now, Juice and Alpha had executed mission after mission, a punishing operational tempo, going farther out and more exposed each time, looking for the clue that would bring humanity back from the brink. And they’d accomplished these missions, returning with their objective every time.

  But, time after time, nothing came of these successes. While there had been a few promising vaccine and serum candidates, and all were being worked on by the clinical researchers in Edinburgh and London, before this week there had never been anything like a cure – nothing even close to rolling out for human clinical trials. So they had essentially finished each mission right where they started – except more tired, more worn down, and with more of humanity chipped away around them.

  And with the operators having cheated death once more. Which meant they were that much closer to having their number come up. They had to be.

  They could keep resisting, keep staying alive, keep completing the missions. But was there any possibility of final victory? Or was it just a matter of time – until they were all worn down, until Juice and his friends were all dead?

  He sighed out loud now into the blackness – but heard nothing. Jesus, he thought, listening to the snoring below, which sounded like a construction crew framing a house. How the hell does he not wake himself up?

  But the real truth was that Juice had been waging a secret inner battle for a long time now. None of his teammates would ever have guessed he was struggling. Juice was the cuddly, deadly, high-tech teddy bear. Mr. Reliable, the easygoing machine, always smiling, and always getting it done – whether that was hacking computers and networks, or wiring up improvised electronics, or just shooting, moving, and blowing shit up effectively.

  But Juice had always secretly felt that he had to do more – to make up for his background, which was less exalted than that of the other operators. He had come here from what was known as the Intelligence Support Activity – and, before that, from the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group.

  Both were elite units – in their ways.

  But the Activity was about signals intelligence (SIGINT), and not direct action or shooting. And Army Special Forces, also called the Green Berets, was the largest special operations unit in the U.S. military – and could in part be distinguished from the more elite ones by the fact that they actually tried to keep people in the selection and training program. Rather than doing their damnedest to pummel them into quitting.

  Sure, both the Green Berets and the Activity were elite – but they were definitely not Delta, and they were not SEAL Team Six. And Juice had always felt that, to prove he belonged at this level, he had to work harder, do more, and all the while keep a bigger smile on his face while doing it.

  The others thought it came naturally to him.

  But it was actually a decision – about what kind of man, and what kind of operator, he wanted to be. And that was a decision he intended to own.

  Sometimes he thought it just came easier to the others – they were bigger, stronger, tougher, more unflappable. Even Ali was naturally tougher than he was – totally imperturbable, no matter how bad things got. And she had nothing short of superhuman skills on the long gun. Juice had no doubt she worked hard at that – had worked incredibly hard her whole life. But her skills were on such a totally different level from mere mortals like Juice, that God must have leaned down out of heaven and kissed her on the forehead at birth.

  Hell, I don’t know, he thought. Maybe those at the very top always made it look easy. Maybe that was part of what it meant to be at the top.

  Also, he had things going on down at levels of his psyche below even that one. Alone now in the dark, down in the womb of the gigantic warship, and amid the racket of Pred’s snoring – and in the safety of his own head – he could just about start to admit it.

  Juice was afraid.

  It had been swelling up from way down inside him for a long time, and only now could he really acknowledge it.

  He was afraid – of dying.

  The ranks around him were definitely thinning, the odds continuing to mount – and it was getting harder to ignore that their shaves were getting closer and closer. Chicago had been absolutely insane, the hairiest and closest-run op he’d ever been on – that is, until the Battle of the JFK. There was no way any of them should have walked away from that one. And there was surely no way they could successfully take on anything worse.

  Basically, Juice was finding it harder to maintain his optimism that he would still be around at the end of all this. He felt like his number had to be coming up soon.

  Maybe that was the message of his recurring dream.

  He sighed again, still inaudible under the snoring. And he pulled his mental resources together – because he knew he had to steel himself again, however depleted he might feel. He tried to remember the lines from that Eminem song – something about how if he didn’t have enough in the tank, maybe he could siphon enough just to fill up one last can…

  And he absolutely had to do so. Because there was something else, something much more important than life, more urgent than his mortal fears – something beyond the obligations of professionalism, beyond even the survival of the species. And it was this:

  Simply, he knew that he couldn’t make it without the love and respect of his brothers, and sister, in Alpha. The world outside that small circle was just too cold. It was all that held him together.

  And, in the end, it was all that mattered.

  And his terror of letting them down, of losing his place in that elite and utterly unique fraternity… in comparison to that, all his other fears were as lint, as dust.

  In another version of his dream, while they were waiting for the signal to march off to their deaths… instead, snow started to fall. And it covered all the Zulus and froze them and made a beautiful, peaceful snowscape. And Juice looked upon it with his brothers, all of them safe.

  And at peace.

  And together for the rest of time.

  Echo of Sparrows

  The USS John F. Kennedy - Bridge

  The phone at Drake’s station flashed, and the acting commander of the Kennedy strike group raced to snatch up the handset.

  “Yeah. You’re sure? Fine.” Replacing the phone, he looked up at Abrams, his acting executive officer (XO). “It’s the Admiral Nakhimov. CIC has positive ID.”

  Abrams shook his head. “Christ. I thought so. Not too many warships that size – in the old world or this one.”

  Drake squinted up at his XO. “But what the hell is a Russian Kirov-class battlecruiser, from their Northern Fleet, doing off the coast of South Africa? It makes no goddamned sense.”

  Abrams shrugged. “She was probably doing what everyone else was – trying to escape the plague. Then they sent a party ashore to scavenge for supplies. And brought the infection back on board.”

  Both Drake and Abrams looked up at the overhead video display, watching the giant, weapons-bristling battlecruiser grow bigger and meaner on live video, as their helicopter drone overflew her. The Admiral Nakhimov was just out of sight over the horizon, anchored in the mouth of Saldanha Bay, home to a South African naval station and depot – one that was hoped to have supplies desperately needed by the Kennedy and the warriors who sailed on her.

  The Russian ship herself looked like a throwback to the World-War-Two-era battleships – long, wide, tall, and menacing – though she didn’t have multiple big deck guns like the battleships of yore, only a couple of smaller 130mm ones. But what she lacked in guns she more than made up for in a huge arsenal of surface-to-air missiles, cruise missiles, rockets, and torpedoes. The whole foredeck was covered with a matrix of pop-up missile cells, and surrounded by swiveling rocket and torpedo launchers.

  She also had 76mm armor-plating all around, and was fully 827 feet long, ne
arly as long as the Kennedy – and, like the supercarrier, nuclear-powered.

  “No response to hails, sir,” reported the radio officer.

  “Helm, all stop,” Drake ordered.

  After the better part of a week at sea, blasting ahead relentlessly at forty knots, the USS John F. Kennedy finally began churning to a stop. When Abrams stepped out onto the observation platform with binoculars in hand, he could just make out the shape of the big battlecruiser ahead.

  It lay just off the Western Cape of Africa.

  The place where the end began.

  * * *

  “We’re slowing,” Handon said, looking over his shoulder at Ali. The two of them, plus Homer and his two children, Ben and Isabel, all stood out on the carrier’s flight deck, up near the front edge, waiting and watching as Africa swelled on the horizon. They shared the prow with a crowd of perhaps a hundred other members of the Kennedy’s crew, all watching landfall.

  “No,” Homer said, wrapping his arms around his kids. “We’re stopping.” He could feel the change in vibration beneath their feet, as the engines, nuclear-powered and thus having no idle mode, went offline.

  And then, sounding strangely peaceful, a muted klaxon went off, from somewhere behind and below them, to the left.

  For some reason, Ali found herself flashing back to the cockpit of the Apache helicopters she used to fly in a past life, long before her spec-ops days – and their onboard Missile Warning Receiver (MWR). The last time she had heard that sound was in Afghanistan. And it was the last thing she had heard before she was shot down, in the harsh and unforgiving mountains of the Hindu Kush.

  Snapping her back to the present, the warbling warning noise was followed by a great whooshing sound from the same place, down and left, as two flashing darts appeared from beneath the port side of the ship, trailing orange flame and gray-and-white smoke. Two seconds later, a pair of explosions blossomed out ahead on the horizon, low to the water. The sound of their detonation reached those on deck a few seconds afterward.