Phobos

by Steve Alten

  The squad leader approaches the rear doors of the transport and touches his gloved palm to the computer keypad. The encrypted security codes are relayed from the White House through neural conduits in the soldier’s glove, the signal of which must match his own biorhythms before being uploaded.

  The rear hatch opens, activating a ramp. The sensory prison—an eight-by-twelve-foot windowless lead-gray steel and acrylic cube set on a magnetic hover pad—is maneuvered out of the truck.

  Devlin Mabus watches everything from his balcony on the sixth floor. The seven-ton steel vault door opens, its magnetic hinges whisper-quiet.

  The sensory prison, escorted by the detail of cyberwarriors, is guided inside.

  Though only ninety-six square feet, the interior of the holographic relocation cell appears as a vast Jamaican island beach resort. Artificial lighting coming from the ceiling panels re-creates the sun, the bulbs tinged with ultraviolet rays. Temperature-controlled fans provide a salty ocean breeze, with an occasional gust offering a saline “spritz” from the tropical sea.

  Shaded by the gently swaying palm fronds of a coconut tree, Mitchell Kurtz lies back in his lounge chair, enjoying the nubile bikini-clad women walking in the ankle-deep surf before him. “If this is prison, I’ll take two life sentences.”

  “Shut up, fool. You and your damn pharmaceutical-fed libido is what got us into this mess in the first place.” Ryan Beck has his ear pressed to the cabana deck, the hotel “guests” distorting as they pass across his body. “Magnetic couplings are being shut down. Wherever we are, I’d say we just arrived. Manny, wake up.”

  Immanuel Gabriel slips out of his rapid eye movement trance and sits up in the holographic sand. He has spent most of the last eighteen hours in a state of hypnotic rest, preparing himself for the battle to come.

  The internal lights flicker, the beach scene replaced by four porous gray walls, ceiling, and floor. A hatch opens along one wall, revealing a squad of heavily armed soldiers.

  “The prisoners will exit the vehicle. Move!”

  Manny climbs down out of the cell, followed by his two companions.

  There are standing in Chichen Itza’s ancient Mesoamerican ball court, the thousand-year-old stone baked warm beneath a cloudless blue Yucatan sky.

  Kurtz looks around. “This is like a bad déjà vu.”

  The playing field is a good football-field-and-a-half long, though slightly narrower in width, a rectangle of grass imprisoned within four walls constructed of limestone block. Anchored to the two perpendicular walls like a giant vertical donut is a circular stone ring, its hoop twenty inches in diameter. Below the timeworn goals are slanted embankments adorned with Mayan ballgame reliefs. Situated atop the eastern wall is a twenty-six-foot-high structure—a replica of Chichen Itza’s Temple of the Jaguar. Towering in the distance is the Kukulcan Pyramid.

  Manny closes his eyes and inhales deeply, his senses processing their surroundings. “We’re in a holographic arena, the same one Jake trained in twenty years ago.”

  Beck curses under his breath. “Hangar 13. Your brother spilled a lot of blood and sweat in this place.”

  Manny nods. He can smell his twin’s lingering scent as clearly as one can detect smoke from a nearby forest fire.

  The mobile prison is maneuvered out of the arena by armed cyberwarriors. One of the soldiers aims his pain cannon at Salt and Pepper. “The two of you are to come with us. Gabriel, you’ll remain behind. If you’re victorious in battle, then your friends will be set free. Should you lose, they will die painfully.”

  “Couldn’t you just toss us back in that prison cell with a few sixpacks?”

  Facing Kurtz, the soldier fires a short burst of energy from the device secured to his forearm, causing the bodyguard to double over in agony. He turns back to Manny. “You may remove your neural collar once we exit the arena. You are no longer restricted from using the Nexus.”

  The military men escort Beck and Kurtz out of the training facility, leaving behind a pile of body armor, the black exoskeleton identical to the one Immanuel wore fifteen years ago when Jacob had attempted to train him for combat on Xibalba. The suit’s outer layer is composed of nanofiber ceramics backed by a lightweight carbon, the fabric as strong as steel yet as light as cotton.

  The weapon is a sword, its double-edged blade peppered with dime-size electrical conductors. The faster the sword is wielded, the hotter the steel will heat.

  Manny takes the weapon, ignoring the body armor.

  The warrior approaches from the western end of the ball court. White exoskeleton. Flowing white hair and intense black eyes, framed in thick red blood vessels. A sword carried in one hand, his headpiece in the other.

  “Hello, Uncle.”

  “You look so much like your father it’s scary.”

  “Put on your battle armor.”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “This is a fight to the death.”

  “Is that why I can taste your fear?”

  Devlin clenches his teeth. Tossing aside his own headpiece, he wields the heavy sword in both hands, whirling it before him in a repeating figure-eight pattern, the blade heating up until it glows red.

  With a warrior’s bellow, he attacks.

  Manny’s front thrust kick is a blur, the sole of his boot striking his nephew’s chest plate like gunshot, the blow cracking Devlin’s body armor while propelling the teen backward twenty feet.

  Lying on his back, the stunned fourteen-year-old struggles to breathe, his sternum badly bruised.

  Manny stands over him, his sword poised over his cracked chest plate. “To the death then?”

  Devlin’s eyes tear up. “Do it, Uncle. End my suffering.”

  “Oops, you said uncle. That means I win.” Manny smiles, tossing the blade aside.

  The confused adolescent sits up in agony. “Wait. This isn’t over!”

  “You said uncle. Back in my day, saying uncle meant you give up.” He walks off, heading for the exit.

  The g-force that strikes him from behind is equivalent to a locomotive slamming into a stalled pickup truck, far more powerful than Manny had expected. Had he not been waiting for the attack in the Nexus, the bone-crushing force would have been lethal.

  Harbored in the gelid corridor leading to the higher dimensions, Immanuel Gabriel parries the blow, then spins his startled nephew into a headlock, securing him from behind.

  And that’s when he feels it, a dark force seething deep within Devlin’s aura, a wellspring of energy that far surpasses his own, fueling the teen’s fight despite the fact that the choke hold becomes more lethal as he resists.

  It takes all of Manny’s strength to bridle his bucking nephew, who finally goes limp in his arms. Stubborn as your father …

  The two Hunahpu emerge from the Nexus.

  Manny leaves the unconscious teen in the holographic arena, using his heightened olfactory sense to track down the boy’s mother.

  8

  Evil does not exist, or at least it does not exist unto itself.

  Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness

  and cold, a word that man has created to describe the

  absence of heat. God did not create evil. Evil is the result

  of what happens when man does not have God’s love

  present in his heart. It’s like the cold that comes when

  there is no heat, or the darkness that comes when there is

  no light.

  —ANONYMOUS

  Moving through Hangar 13, Immanuel Gabriel quickly detects the intoxicating scent of Lilith Aurelia Mabus’s pheromones. The Hunahpu half-breed finds himself in a state of arousal that charges every vasomotor-driven nerve ending in his body.

  Olfaction, the process of locating through smell, is a sense that varies greatly among species. Sharks can smell a drop of blood or amino acids among billions of droplets of seawater. A dog’s sense of smell is a thousand times more powerful than a human’s.

  The ev
olutionary process that transformed primitive man to modern man greatly reduced the olfactory sense in the hominid nose from 80 million to 5 million receptors. Conversely, the post-human society that evolved from Homo sapiens on “future Earth” developed a heightened sense of smell, which was used to select a compatible mate and track him or her over great distances.

  Manny finds her waiting for him in a repair terminal on the northeast side of the complex. His heart pounds in his throat as he approaches, her musk oozing beneath the skin-tight red and white H.O.P.E. jumpsuit, unzipped just enough to reveal a hint of bare cleavage. Her raven hair is long and wavy, draped over one shoulder in a tight ponytail.

  Aroused by Manny’s presence, Lilith leans against a forklift, panting.

  Born on the same day thirty-four years ago, the two blood cousins have never met nor have they ever spoken. Suddenly brought together, they circle each other like predators in heat, inhaling each other’s scent, the diminishing space between them charged with electricity. Presumed enemies, they struggle to refrain from physical contact, their act of restriction rendered meaningless by their senses, which quickly confirm a perfect genetic match. Every scent of breath intoxicates with a madness that breaches all logic and agenda, all part of a mating ritual unknown to either prior to this very moment in time, yet predestined long ago by their Hunahpu DNA.

  Immanuel Gabriel and Lilith Mabus cease to exist, their angst replaced by blind animal lust. Eyes rolled upward, they attack one another in a fit of passion, their tongues entwining, their kiss so violent it crushes their lips, drawing blood. Lilith’s legs wrap around Manny’s hips as they moan into one another’s mouths until the rush of endorphins nearly causes them to pass out.

  Manny reaches for her jumpsuit, attempting to expose her lower body, only Lilith restrains him, panting as she pushes him away. “Why have you remained hidden from me?”

  “You tried to kill me.”

  “I was confused. Your brother rejected me. An act of cruelty that spawned a thousand retaliations.”

  “Jacob rejected you out of fear. Our father told him you were dangerous.”

  “I’ve changed.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Because you want to. Because you were the one responsible.” She backs away, gasping like a fish out of water, forcing starvation upon her overloaded pleasure centers. “Your brother and I were children when we first communicated in the Nexus; we were twenty when we met and he inseminated me with Devlin. It was an act of seduction on my part, born from a dark past that instilled in me an agenda I was compelled to pursue. That agenda has been excised, all because you defied your own destiny and remained behind. Jacob was powerful but imbalanced emotionally, easily exploited. Not you. We may lose each other to lust, but I could never seduce you, not when you’re the anchor of restriction that transformed me into something I never imagined I could be.”

  “And what is that?”

  Her eyes tear up. “Someone capable of love.”

  Her scent dissipates, enabling him to take her in with his eyes. Moving closer, he kisses her gently on the lips, then hugs her to his chest, their genetically driven hunger quenched by something far deeper.

  They remain locked together until the late afternoon sun bleeds into dusk.

  “Manny, I need to show you something. The reason why I brought you here.”

  “First, my two bodyguards.”

  She touches a comm link on her collar. “Gabriel’s bodyguards … where are they?”

  “The holding cell on level 2.”

  “Release them and feed them, I want them treated as guests. Tell them Manny will meet with them tomorrow night.”

  “Understood.”

  Manny’s eyes widen. “Where are you taking me?”

  For more than four decades, the space shuttle Orbiter remained the heart of NASA’s Space Transportation System (STS). Designed in the 1970s, the bulky 122-foot-long craft was launched vertically as a rocket and landed as a space plane, its 172,000-pound girth powered by three Rocketdyne Block II engines and seventy thousand pounds of fuel. Designed as a reusable space vehicle, the Orbiter delivered an average payload at a cost of $1.5 billion. Despite upgrades, it remained an antiquated means of transportation until it was finally retired in 2011.

  H.O.P.E.’s space plane was engineered to be far more aerodynamic and fuel efficient. Twice the length of the shuttle, with a far larger wingspan yet only half the diameter and a third of the weight, the supersonic craft looked more like a souped-up Concorde. Taking off like a commercial jet, the space plane flew to the edge of space before vertical thrusters powered it into orbit. With it designed strictly as a tourist transport, payloads ran less than half a million dollars for a twelve-hour trip, a cost easily dwarfed by the $4 million in passenger fees.

  Lilith and Manny are alone in the main cabin, strapped into bucket seats designed to withstand four Gs of force. The pilot communicates with them from the flight deck using the video-comm. “Mrs. Mabus, we have clearance for takeoff. Are you all set?”

  “We’re good to go.” Lilith squeezes Manny’s hand. “You’ve never been in space, have you?”

  “No. But I came close once.”

  “I’ve been on more than a hundred flights and it never gets old, though it’s probably more impacting during a day launch.”

  The space plane accelerates down the deserted runway and rises smoothly into the night. The cabin lights are lowered, the Hunahpu couple’s blue eyes radiating a soft gray in the darkness.

  “So, is this cruise business, mythology, or pleasure?”

  “Perhaps all three.” Her expression turns serious. “Manny, when you faced my son in the Nexus, did you feel another presence in the void?”

  “Yes. It was strange, like a malevolent force causing an internal conflict. For a moment I registered two genetic signals, different, yet symbiotically compatible. It’s as if your son was being guided by a darker, far stronger spiritual energy, only the higher power—”

  “—is his own consciousness.”

  “Yes. But how is that possible?”

  “Somehow, many years from now, Devlin and I will both come to exist in another reality—an underworld described in the Popol Vuh as Xibalba. In this alternate existence, our souls will be corrupted by dark forces attributed to Satan, though in truth, my own soul was tainted long ago. I must have died on Xibalba, yet somehow Jacob managed to cleanse my soul. The effects rippled back across space-time to affect me only days after he left. Devlin was born pure, his soul darkening with the arrival of adolescence, as mine did when I was his age. What you sensed in him was the malignant adult reaching across the higher dimensions to corrupt the soul of the adolescent. Each day I lose him a little bit more.”

  “He’s dangerous. As a pure Hunahpu, he’s far stronger than either of us, he just lacks the neural development to coordinate his powers. He needs to be neutralized before that happens.”

  Lilith grabs his arm in a viselike grip. “He’s still my son, your brother’s own flesh and blood. He can be saved!”

  She releases him, rubbing his biceps. “I’m sorry. And I know what you must be thinking—can I trust this crazy bitch? Is she the Delilah to my Samson? Will she corrupt me like she corrupted Jacob?”

  “The thought had occurred to me.”

  “The answer comes down to nature versus nurture. Why does evil run rampant? Is it in our nature, our DNA? Or is it a result of the way we were raised, the values instilled in us that guide us when it comes to free will?

  “I was born into violence. My father, if you can call him that, stabbed my mother to death in a fit of drunken rage minutes after I was born, all because he expected to be raising a son to ensure his legacy. The man who ended up raising me, my foster grandfather, preferred me as a girl; he began sodomizing me at the age of eight.”

  “Jesus …”

  “Jesus had nothing to do with it, but I certainly never hesitated to blame him as he watched my legal guardian rape m
e from his perch on the crucifix mounted above our bed. As you can imagine, my mind was decimated by the abuse. Trapped, I learned to mentally hibernate during the physical abuse by escaping into the soothing light of the Nexus. One day I felt another presence sharing the void, and that’s how I first came in contact with Jacob, or at least his consciousness. Your twin was my only friend; he helped me get through the torment until we were Devlin’s age, when he abruptly abandoned me.”

  “You murdered our aunt.”

  “My mind was poisoned. Jacob’s sudden absence left me suicidal. And then a dark presence came to me in the form of a Nagual witch, a spirit by the name of Don Rafelo. Claiming he was my great-uncle, Don Rafelo taught me how to use my physical beauty as a weapon, and from that day forward I ceased being a victim. As my Hunahpu powers grew stronger, I lost myself to temptation, the witch driving me to worship Satan. At the same time, I was also created to serve a Hunahpu agenda—in my case, the preservation of our species. You might think this would have been in direct conflict with Satan; in fact, it was the fallen angel who pushed me to succeed, for without man and his acts of negativity, Satan is nothing more than a lifeless deflated vessel.”

  “What made you believe humanity was in danger?”

  “Sometime around my seventeenth birthday, I began experiencing intense nightmares, all detailing images of a global cataclysmic destruction. The Mayan calendar prophesied the Doomsday Event I was envisioning, but the dates made no sense. The end of the fifth cycle concluded on December 21 in 2012—nine months before our birth—yet somehow humanity had survived. Still, the threat obviously remained, and through my visions I tracked the destruction foretold in my dreams to the Yellowstone caldera. Like a modern-day Noah, I set a plan in motion to construct a fleet of space arks, first by marrying Lucien Mabus, then by using his company and wealth to revolutionize the space tourism industry. It’s taken me seventeen years to ready a dozen shuttles and a colony on Mars, and now, because of you, everything has somehow changed. While the Doomsday threat is more real than ever, the cause of the cataclysm has shifted.”