Kingmaker Read online

  ALSO BY CHRISTIAN CANTRELL:

  Containment

  SHORT STORIES:

  Farmer One

  Venom

  The Epoch Index

  Anansi Island

  Human Legacy Project

  Brainbox

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright 2013 © Christian Cantrell

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477807439

  ISBN-10: 1477807438

  Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2013938241

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE THE END OF THE SILK ROAD

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PART TWO DON’T BLINK

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART THREE QUEEN SACRIFICE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  PART FOUR ENTROPY POOL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  GIVE ME A LEVER LONG ENOUGH AND A FULCRUM ON WHICH TO PLACE IT, AND I SHALL MOVE THE WORLD.

  —ARCHIMEDES

  PROLOGUE

  * * *

  KHRUNICHEV STATE RESEARCH AND PRODUCTION SPACE CENTER (KHSC)

  MOSCOW, RUSSIA

  OCTOBER 16, 1997

  7:22 A.M.

  * * *

  Grigori Kedrov was not called to the director’s office. He was brought.

  The two men who escorted him never produced, revealed, or even hinted at the weapons beneath their coats. There was no need. At the moment of eye contact, there was an instantaneous nonverbal agreement: it was over, and the more Grigori cooperated, the easier it would be. Grigori watched the men for a moment, then placed the coupling he had been examining down on a bench. The two men kept Grigori between them as they walked, and they all ignored the astonished gazes of the other engineers.

  As he was led into the dim, mahogany-paneled office, Grigori saw the one thing he hoped he would not: his wife. She was sitting in one of the two chairs in front of the massive, intricately carved oak desk. Her spine was straight and her knuckles were pale as she gripped the chair’s ornate armrests. Grigori thought that she was bound, but when she turned, he could see that her restraints were self-imposed.

  The man behind the director’s desk was not the director. His cold, slate-blue eyes were set slightly too close together, which gave him an unsettling and predatory stare. There were four other men in the room—two on each side. Their long dark coats were open and their hands were clasped at their waists.

  In the center of the desk was a tiny aluminum microfilm canister.

  Grigori and Tetyana had been working at KhSC since December of 1984. By then, most of the engineers from Chernobyl who were still able to work had been relocated to Moscow and assigned to the Zarya project. Zarya was initially designed as a propulsion module for the Mir orbital space station, but it never flew. It was later used as an upper-stage engine for the Polyus spacecraft—a weapons platform designed to use megawatt carbon-dioxide lasers to destroy American Strategic Defense Initiative satellites which were, in turn, designed to use directed-energy weapons to destroy Soviet ICBMs. After the fall of the Soviet Union—and in a remarkable spectacle of post–Cold War irony—NASA chose Zarya over a similar US-built option to be the very first module of the International Space Station. Although it was of Soviet design and was being built by a Russian company, Zarya was funded by the Americans, and therefore owned by the United States.

  The hermetically sealed aluminum microfilm canister in the center of the director’s desk had been discovered behind one of the four earth-orientation instruments. It was not part of Zarya’s design.

  When Tetyana saw her husband, she stood, crossed the room, and embraced him. All four men advanced from the sides of the room and began to separate them, but the captain snapped his fingers and waved them off. Let them, he said. He watched the man rock his wife and stroke her long chestnut hair. There is no harm in it, the captain told his men. All the harm that could be done had been done already.

  The woman turned and started to speak to the captain, but her husband stopped her. He told her it was best not to say anything. The captain watched her with his cool blue eyes and said he already knew what she was going to ask, and that the answer was yes. Their son would be looked after. He would be cared for and raised by the state. The captain did not smile, but his eyes softened. They needn’t worry about the boy, he told them. He assured the two traitors that he would personally see to Alexei’s well-being, education, and most importantly, to his training.

  PART ONE

  THE END OF THE SILK ROAD

  CHAPTER ONE

  Alexei Kedrov did not have a heart. He was the first agent of the Russian Federal Security Service to have it removed and replaced with two perfectly silent continuous flow centrifugal pumps that integrated flawlessly with his autonomic nervous system. The procedure was not done for health reasons—in fact, his heart was so robust that it was preserved in the Kremlin’s presidential tissue bank—but rather as a way to increase stealth; Alexei became invisible to even the most advanced heartbeat sensors employed by security systems, black ops units, and all forms of cardio-acoustic, antipersonnel ballistics.

  An additional benefit to not having a pulse was the ability to pass for a corpse. It was rare that such a morbid aptitude proved convenient, but certainly not without precedent. More than once Alexei had gone unnoticed by covering himself with fistfuls of nearby purple glistening entrails and holding his breath while a soldier scanned him with his handheld electric potential sensor, attributed the minimal readings to residual brain activity, and moved on.

  Before the procedure, Alexei was known as Lev, or “the Lion”—a testament to his intrepid nature and uninhibited ferocity. Afterwards he was called “Tin Man.”

  Relinquishing his heart had saved Alexei’s life on several occasions, and now he was depending on it to help him start a new one. It was not generally difficult to get into the United States anymore since there were far more people making plans to leave than had dreams of immigrating, but getting in without being photographed, scanned, and possibly even microchipped or isotoped (and henceforth monitored by the FBI, CIA, NSA, and/or Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was becoming increasingly problematic. Although there never seemed to be sufficient funding or consensus to pass legislation designed to help feed, clothe, house, or employ Americans, any initiative promising to track them more closely enjoyed lavish financial support and expedited nonpartisan ratification.

  Given the current political climate, the state o
f American civil liberties, and the nature of armed conflict across the globe, it occurred to Alexei that the easiest way to penetrate the United States border without being identified or registered was probably as a dead enemy combatant. Rather than maintaining complex and expensive processing facilities all over the world, it was far cheaper and easier to hire contractors to load the bodies of suspected, accused, condemned, and subsequently executed terrorists into reusable carbon fiber caskets, transfer them onto freight drones, and send them off to labs in Northern California, South Carolina, or Texas, where the entire process of unloading, dissecting, analyzing, and finally disposing of remains was completely automated. Most insurgents entered the facility more or less anonymous, but by the time the carborane acids in which their limbs and organs were dissolved got sent out to be disposed of as hazardous waste, the United States had obtained photographs, measurements, biometrics, a full DNA profile, genealogical data, and several other data points useful in matching casualties to known targets, and more importantly, in helping to identify new ones.

  The most abundant producers of enemy combatant corpses bound for the US were probably the “narco-cratic” nations of Mexico and Columbia, whose only remaining political parties were recent evolutionary offshoots of the Los Zetas, Sinaloa, and Norte del Valle drug cartels. Unfortunately, while constant paramilitary operations were certain to provide Alexei with ample opportunity, there were far too many ways between Russia and just about anywhere in Latin America to register on the ubiquitous and omniscient radar nets cast by any number of three-letter American agencies. Therefore the safest, most reliable, and most convenient option was Iran.

  Alexei bought a Range Rover in Volgograd from a balding man in a lustrous, electric blue track suit who proved willing to trade cash for an unofficial and hassle-free transaction (which Alexei knew would later be reported as a theft in order to justify the lack of documentation, and to yield a supplemental payment from the insurance company). The dealer even threw in a complimentary roof rack, several spare hydrogen fuel cells, and after the second time Alexei stood up to walk out, micro-weave floor mats apparently impregnated with stain-dissolving enzymes. Alexei drove the two thousand kilometers south to Tehran in a single day where he traded the Range Rover for a used BMW R 1400 GS Adventure motorcycle with massive titanium panniers and a computerized traction control system designed specifically for riding through sand. The dealer tried to sell him a helmet and several other types of ballistic protection (including a full-body, one-piece suit capable of inflating from neck to ankle in less than ten milliseconds should the built-in accelerometer suddenly report values consistent with an accident), but Alexei already had his own custom-engineered gear. With the cash left over from the deal, he bought two weeks’ worth of supplies, then discovered it was far easier to find prostitutes in an Islamic republic than a single liter of even mediocre vodka. His persistence eventually paid off, however, and he spent one more night at the Tehran Milad Tower before leaving the next morning for Dasht-e Kavir, or the Great Salt Desert.

  He used his handset to monitor communications between military contractor outposts, the constellation of geosynchronous satellites overhead, and hundreds of both aerial and terrestrial drones in the region. It was programmed to look for a very specific set of criteria. Since he needed relatively well-intact corpses to blend in among, the most important thing was that the attack on the insurgents be conducted using some form of chemical agent or discreet directed-energy weapon rather than conventional or tactical nuclear ordnance likely to incinerate every solid object within a radius of five hundred meters. He also had to be able to reach the target in the brief window of time between when the last of the UAVs left the area and the body harvesting crew arrived.

  Alexei smoked a particular brand of pure black filterless cigarette which he had stocked up on before leaving Moscow. He’d been rationing them at an increasing rate during his time in the desert, and was now down to his last one. As soon as he lit it with a miniature plasma torch, he saw his handset come alive on the seat of his bike. He picked it up to verify the criteria, then took a long, wistful drag, flicked the unsmoked remains off into the sand, and hastily began striking his meager camp. Assuming he hadn’t made any gross miscalculations, Alexei knew that within twelve hours, he would very likely be on his way to the US to start not just a new mission, but an entirely new life.

  The attack would be outside of Kashmar, which was several hundred kilometers away from Alexei’s current position. It had been long enough since it rained last that the BMW’s microwave density sensors assured him that he could ride directly over the great crusts of salt without fear of falling through into the black saline marshes below. He stood up on his foot pegs until the ridges of minerals flattened out into dirt, and then into paths, and finally into the closest thing to a road Alexei had seen in weeks.

  The handset was clipped in among the bike’s instrument cluster and he checked it as he rode. He was close enough when the attack occurred that had the target been destroyed, he would have probably heard it. Since no acrid black plumes rose above the horizon ahead, he knew that the site contained bodies and/or equipment that the United States considered vital and therefore fully intended to recover.

  The reds and browns and blacks of salt and sand were behind Alexei now and it was almost ten degrees cooler as he began to pass through the shade of occasional trees. He was still several kilometers outside of Kashmar when the dirt road turned to gravel and he approached a cluster of warehouses. The windows were boarded and the old chipped brick was covered in the dripping twists and swirls and dots of Farsi graffiti which the transparent LCD inside Alexei’s visor translated into “God is great” and “Death to Israel” and “Behead all infidel pig-fuckers.” Weeds pushed up through the gravel out front where several Iranian sedans were parked at various angles. The trees around the buildings looked too straight—even for products of genetic engineering—and as Alexei got off his bike, he realized that they were artificial. The silicon foliage concealed antennas, transmitters, and clear plastic parabolic satellite dishes watching several different regions of the sky at once. He left the keys in the ignition and did not remove his helmet.

  The first warehouse Alexei checked explained the Americans’ interest. There were no bodies, but dozens of drones were arranged throughout the space, each a dramatically unique model. In the natural light permitted by the transparent thermoplastic panels in the ceiling, Alexei could see everything from an old stealth Sentinel reconnaissance UAV—the Beast of Kandahar, as it was once known—to multicopter gunships to racks of Hummingbird- and Dragonfly-class micro aerial vehicles. Nestled in below the wings and rotors of the larger aircraft were several models of continuous-track and 6x6 UGVs, or Unmanned Ground Vehicles, and even a few quadrupedal and bipedal transport, antipersonnel, and antiaircraft assets commonly referred to as “mechs.” Several of the machines were partially disassembled—clearly in the process of being reverse engineered—and the air inside the hanger was thick with the fumes of kerosene-based jet fuel and the metallic tinge of old battery acid. Although there were various components tagged and laid out on steel, multi-tiered machine tables, there was no wreckage, and none of the vehicles appeared to have sustained any damage. It looked as though everything in the warehouse had been captured fully intact.

  The next structure was exactly what Alexei was expecting. Even through his one-piece, composite-weave suit he felt the frigid air wash over him as he slid the door open. The space was divided between racks of servers and rows of workstations, all connected by cables dropping down from a low ceiling of metal latticework panels. Alexei had infiltrated facilities like this before and he knew that some of the cabling was for data and some of the lines carried water—likely condensed from the vapor byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells—which was used to draw thermal energy away from the synthetic diamond heat sinks clamped down over what probably totaled tens of thousands of parallel processor cores.

  Alexei was inside
a modern Iranian war room.

  All of the technicians were dead. They lay in pools of bodily fluids, their white microfiber thermal-insulated suits absorbing the blood from their gums and eyes and ears, and the greenish-brown bile heaved up from their stomachs with their very last breaths. The attack had obviously been radiological, conducted by one or more quadrotor drones focusing beams of ionizing radiation—probably gamma rays—at levels of at least one hundred thousand roentgens. Unconsciousness would have been almost instantaneous and death from internal hemorrhaging not far behind.

  The building would probably not be safe until it was fully decontaminated, so Alexei backed out and closed the door. He felt the ring beneath his glove vibrate and he took his handset out of his thigh pocket and checked the map. The Americans were less than a kilometer away and approaching rapidly. He picked a spot between the nearest building and his bike, took a few casual steps, relaxed his arms and legs, and collapsed.

  He couldn’t tell exactly how many vehicles there were, but from the number of doors he heard open and slam, he guessed at least three. There were the sounds of ammo magazines being slapped into place, rounds being chambered, and safeties being released, but he could tell the men were not advancing in any kind of formation. Their boots kicked lackadaisically at the gravel as they gathered.

  “Check him out. Dude almost got away.”

  “What the hell’s a bike like that doing way the fuck out here?”

  “I don’t know, but the poor thing’s all alone without anyone in the world to take care of it.”

  “To the victor go the spoils.”

  “How the hell are you going to get that thing back?”

  “It’s a motorcycle, you fucking retard. How do you think?”

  “Man, if I were you, I wouldn’t go near that thing.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s either bobby trapped and you’re going to get your balls blown off right away, or you’re going to hit an IED on the way back and get your balls blown off. Either way, no motorcycle’s worth getting your balls blown off.”