Hammer of Angels: A Novel of Shadowstorm Read online

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  HAMMER OF ANGELS

  A Novel of the Shadowstorm

  G. T. Almasi

  Del Rey

  This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

  Tentative On-Sale Date: March 26, 2013

  Tentative On-Sale Month: April 2013

  Tentative Print Price: $9.99

  Tentative eBook Price: $9.99

  Please note that books will not be available in stores until that above on-sale date. All reviews should be scheduled to run after that date.

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  Del Rey

  An imprint of the Random House Publishing Group

  1745 Broadway • New York, NY • 10019

  PRAISE FOR

  BLADES OF WINTER

  “A hell-bent-for-leather mash-up of spy novel and SF, set in a well-realized alternate history, starring a snarky, hormonal nineteen-year-old named Scarlet, who will capture your heart as well as your imagination. First-rate.”

  —ERIC VAN LUSTBADER, bestselling author of The Bourne Legacy and Father Night

  “Smart, sassy, and seriously appealing. Blades of Winter is a fully realized alternate history with extraordinary detailing and pace, high-velocity writing, and—top of the list—a heroine finding herself via weapons of mass destruction, bionic strength, and the heartbeat of a whole new generation. Seventeen magazine mainlines Terminator in this stunning debut.”

  —JEFF LONG, New York Times best-selling author of The Descent

  “A fun, fast-moving alt-history romp!”

  —S. M. STIRLING, author of The Council of Shadows

  “G. T. Almasi’s Blades of Winter is a smart, punchy deluge of radical thought packed into a febrific alternate-history thrill ride. Almasi is an author finding his stride, mind ablaze with kaleidoscopic insight, creativity, and action. And did I mention humor? Because there’s a lot of that, too.”

  —JAMES WAUGH, senior story developer, Blizzard Entertainment

  “Almasi has created a vivid and entirely believable alternate history that is steeped in historical fact, future science, and international intrigue. Blades of Winter has all the action and excitement of today’s hottest video games and an absolutely unrelenting pace that will keep your heart pounding. The pages practically turn themselves.”

  —JAMES A. BROWN, lead level designer, Epic Games

  “Blades of Winter starts with a freeze-frame bullet to the face and only takes off from there. Vicious action sequences and brilliant SF tech make for some of the best pacing I’ve consumed in a really long time.”

  —SAM STRACHMAN, writer, IP developer, Ubisoft

  HAMMER OF ANGELS

  TK

  By G. T. ALMASI

  Blades of Winter

  Hammer of Angels

  This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

  Hammer of Angels is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by G. T. Almasi

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  RANDOM HOUSE WORLDS and House colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  ISBN 978-0-440-42356-0

  eBook ISBN 978-0-440-42357-7

  www.delreybooks.com

  To Anne, Margot,

  and all the children destroyed by war

  Contents

  Cover

  eBook Information

  Praise for G. T. Almasi

  By G. T. Almasi

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Acknowledgments

  01

  Monday, January 19, 1981, 10:50 P.M. EST

  The Metro, Washington, D.C., USA

  Insanity isn’t nearly as crazy as people make it out to be. After a while even delusions begin to follow a pattern, and given all the practice I’ve had, my little trips to la-la land have gotten much less disorienting. For example, I know the black-haired girl sitting over there is a product of my subconscious, and I don’t have to pull out my pistol and kill her right here on the southbound Metro platform. I’ve hallucinated this same skeezer a lot lately, and one positive aspect of this illusion’s repetitiveness is that she hasn’t morphed into something else, like a fire-breathing dragon or the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  As usual, the chick is 5'4", the same as me, and has the same small-framed gymnast’s build that I do. We both have fair skin, but her eyes are burned brown, not green like mine, and of course I’ve got my mom’s auburn hair, not the shiny black ponytail this bird sports.

  A new detail is how she’s dressed for the weather. Unlike my ultrastylish maroon leather jacket, my imaginary nemesis wears a thick black pea coat to ward off the January chill. When someone walks past, she moves her foot out of the way. Dream Girl’s black Keds are tied really tight, as though someone might steal them right off her feet.

  My hallucination’s deluxe resolution and situational responsiveness means I’m either healthier or nuttier than when I got home from Riyadh last October. Dream Girl was already sitting on a bench here in White Flint Metro station as I came down the escalator. Her ominous presence set me on edge, but it’s not like she’s actually there. Still, for a make-believe person, this broad works awfully hard to avoid looking at me.

  I mentally instruct my implanted Nerve Jet neuroinjector to give me a quick dose of Kalmers. The drugs flow into my bloodstream, and
within seconds my relative lack of sanity stops bothering me.

  It’s been a couple weeks since one of my spells, which has made both me and Dr. Herodotus happy. I’m trying to decide whether or not to tell him about this one when a southbound train finally arrives. I enter the car and take a seat. Dream Girl gets on and sits a few rows away, facing me. At this hour, only a handful of other passengers travel with us.

  We ride like a pair of grim statues into Grosvenor-Strathmore. Past the girl are ads for crappy action movies and lame-ass technology schools. We’re so close I can smell her—an appetizing blend of Noxzema and cheeseburgers—but our eyes don’t meet until our train leaves the station. Then she makes her move.

  The cookie slides her hand into her coat and—it’s such a cliché—pulls out a pistol. My illusions never pull out flowers or tickets to a Redskins game. It’s always a fucking gun.

  Big dark lenses slide out of Dream Girl’s brow and down over her peepers. She points her little dream weapon at me. I stick my tongue out at her. Nyah-nyah! I’ve had this delusion so many—

  BANG!

  Well, that’s never happened. Dream Girl normally vanishes before she takes a shot at me. The make-believe bang gives me an involuntary burst of adrenaline, which in turn prompts my neuroinjector to release a dose of Madrenaline. Swell. Now it’ll seem like all day before that phantom bullet goes away.

  The nonexistent chunk of lead spirals toward my face. Imaginary scuffs have been scraped into the bullet by the illusory rifling in the barrel of my friend’s phony sidearm. I duck out of its way, just to humor her. The slug passes by my face and smashes the window behind me. Such realism!

  Wait. Why has everyone freaked out? The other passengers all run away or dive under their seats as Dream Girl fires another shot. Finally it occurs to me.

  Phantasms don’t need Noxzema.

  She’s real.

  The black-haired bitch’s second bullet hurtles toward my stomach. I grab the ape-hanger bar above my seat and crank myself up and over the incoming projectile. The slug cracks through the back of my seat and leaves a jagged hole.

  My left hand zings under my jacket, and Li’l Bertha practically jumps out of her leather holster. The WeaponSynch pad embossed on my pistol’s grip snaps into the matching recess in my palm. Li’l Bertha jacks into my Eyes-Up display and flashes “Target 1” over Dream Girl’s head.

  My left arm swings into the general vicinity of my competitor, and Li’l Bertha’s gyroscopic aiming system does the rest. The moment my weapon’s display reads “Target Acquired,” I crush her trigger. Li’l Bertha’s swarm of .45-caliber bullets smashes into my opponent’s face, neck, and chest. The girl’s mortal remains splatter all over the windows, walls, and seats. It’s like someone sneezed out a gallon of spaghetti sauce.

  The civilian passengers lose their minds and scream like teenagers at a Beatles concert. My feet slap onto the floor, and I run to the end of the car, where my hands pull the emergency brake and hang on tight while the train comes to a shuddering, shrieking halt.

  I kick the exit door open, leap down to the tracks, and speed away from the stopped train. My staccato footsteps and heavy breathing are accompanied by an older woman’s voice crying out to merciful Jesus.

  02

  Same evening, 11:36 P.M. EST

  Arlington, Virginia, USA

  I lean forward so the driver can hear me over the salsa music that roars out of his cab’s radio. “Okay, right up there, next to the Chandler Metro stop.”

  I pay the cabbie, climb out of the taxi, and pop into Mario’s, a little Italian restaurant on the corner. Mario shoves pizzas in and out of his ovens and asks what he can get me without turning around. I order three slices to go and then stare out at the street while Mario finishes his game of pizza checkers. The window’s monochromatic reflection shows my hair as slate gray instead of its actual red. After a minute I notice a dark smudge on my chin and forehead. I go to the ladies’ room and look in the mirror.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Alix,” I say to myself. There’s dried blood splattered all over my face. It’s a good thing I took a cab. Sometimes a gunshot wound makes a neat little hole and almost nothing leaks out. Other times it’s like smashing open a blood piñata. By the time I wash up and go back out front, my slices are wrapped and ready. While I walk home, I use my Eyes-Up display to review my retinal cameras’ recording of what happened tonight and some of the events that led up to it.

  I’ve made great progress with my self-assigned mission to collar Jakob Fredericks, the nutso American intelligence officer who betrayed my father to the Germans. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but damn, just finding Fredericks’s house has been a bitch! Nearly all the data in his official records is missing, and what is there is mostly wrong. His listed home address turned out to be Griffith Stadium, where the Washington Senators used to [2]play.

  Fortunately, I’ve had some free time to overcome this annoying obstacle. The latest diplomatic disaster with Germany has got all the Beltway brainiacs working day and night to maintain the North Atlantic Alliance and prevent World War III. The D.C. mind-meld includes the smarty geeks at Extreme Operations Division, where I work as a covert field agent. All of ExOps’s Job Numbers have been put on hold until a course of action is hammered out, which has left field people like me with idle hands.

  My boss gave me a few days off so I could help my mother settle us into our new house. This justified my borrowing a company car “for trips to the hardware store.” In fact, I used it to follow Fredericks and find out where the son of a bitch really lives.

  At least his place of work is common knowledge. Fredericks runs the Strategic Services Council on K Street at 15th. As he left work one evening, I tailed him out of the city on the Whitehurst Freeway. I lost him in the daily Key Bridge traffic pit, where half the assholes in D.C. try to cross the Potomac River at the same time. I spent the next couple of days stage trailing him to a small neighborhood past Wildwood Shopping Center in North Bethesda. This morning I had to return the loaner car, so this evening I took the Metro instead.

  I rode to White Flint, walked to Tilden Lane, and “waited” at a bus stop. Fredericks’s Mercedes came around the corner and took the first right. I snuck through a row of people’s yards and poked my head out of a stand of hedges at the end of the block in time to see the Mercedes glide into the attached garage of a big house.

  Gotcha, fucko!

  I spent two hours carefully walking around his neighborhood, casing possible approaches. Behind his house is a small park that is pitch-black at night. It’ll be a great way to sneak in. My plan tomorrow will be to scam some spy toys out of the Technical Department and go back to plant bugs in Fredericks’s house.

  I arrive home. Mom and I have only lived here in Arlington for a couple of weeks. We bought this house to replace our Crystal City house the Blades of Persia blew up last year. It’s a medium-size gray wooden garrison in a neighborhood full of medium-size brick colonials. Mom’s little Chevy is parked in the driveway, and the light is on in her room upstairs.

  It’s late, but I’m twenty years old and way past having a curfew, so I simply walk in the front door instead of sneaking in through my bedroom window like I used to. I turn on the oven to warm up my pizza and then go upstairs. My mother is in bed, reading one of her eighteenth-century novels.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Cleo puts her book down. “Hi, Angel.” She smiles at me. “How was your day?”

  “Fine,” I sit on the foot of her bed and stretch my arms over my head. “Brando and I did research all day.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “We went out after work, plus I stopped at Mario’s.”

  “You two didn’t go to that dump Cyrus likes, did you?” Cyrus, who’s both Mom’s old friend and my boss, is a regular at the Foggy Bottom Grill.

  “Guh.” I snort. “That shithole? No way. Too many career bachelors turning into bar stools.”

  Mom laughs and then studies my face.
She inclines her head and says, “You look tired, Alix.”

  Right on cue, I let out a big yawn. “Spending all day in the ExOps archives is even more tiring than karate class.”

  Cleo’s eyebrows pop up a little. “Don’t you have a training session this week?”

  “Yeah, Wednesday at three. It’s actually a DCT.” Mom is an associate supervisor in ExOps’s admin department, so she knows all about Development Cycle Tests.

  “Want me to pick you up after?” she asks.

  “Sure. Around six?”

  “All right. I was thinking we could catch a movie.”

  I squint at my mother suspiciously. “Which movie?”

  “Well, it is your turn to pick, but not another one of those horrible slasher flicks, please.”

  “Oh, come on, Cleo. You had fun last time!”

  “I certainly did not!”

  “Of course you did. There was blood everywhere!” I wave my hands in a circle to illustrate fountains of gory delight.

  My mother sighs heavily and props her novel up in front of her face. From behind the book, she intones, “Good night, Alixandra.”

  I traipse out of her room. “G’night, Mom.”

  03

  Next morning, Tuesday, January 20, 10:00 A.M. EST

  ExOps Headquarters, Hotel Bethesda, Washington, D.C., USA

  I swig coffee from my jumbo plastic travel mug and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand as I saunter into ExOps’s lobby. Then I spot Brando, and a graveyard chill follows the coffee down my throat. My field partner sprawls in a big leather chair as he whips through the Washington Post’s daily crossword puzzle.

  I activate my infrared vision. He turns into a warm orange blob on a cold blue chair, so yes, he’s there. I switch back to normal vision.

  He smiles as he catches sight of me. He neatly folds his newspaper and stands up.

  Blood streams out of his pant legs—

  Brando’s clunky black Doc Martens ferry him across the polished floor.

  —and leave streaks across the lobby floor—

  Our paths meet at the stainless-steel elevators.