White Peak

by Ronan Frost

  Rask’s chest rose and fell rapidly, his breathing shallow. He didn’t have words. He stiffened in the chair, every muscle in his body cording tight as he threw his head back, seemingly in the grips of a tortuous series of convulsions that had him bucking and writhing against the chair. Another spasm distended Rask’s belly as his back arched away from the leather. And then he fell back against the seat, eyes rolling up inside his head, and for one long sickening second Rye thought he had died.

  And perhaps he had; he was desperately weak, and this treatment, whatever it was, was far more invasive than any round of chemo—but the nanites were not about to let him stay dead.

  He opened his eyes.

  He didn’t say anything for the longest time, and when he did it was to ask Vic to give him a few moments alone with Rye. As the door closed, Rask said, “So, I have to ask you again, Mr. McKenna, do you deserve a second chance?”

  Rye thought about it, and it was a more difficult answer this time, but ultimately the same one. “No. But this is on me. What happens now is my fault. No matter how much I might want to, I can’t just walk away. It was inside my head, Rask. It read my weakness and fear. It knew we were a threat to its existence. That’s why we’re looking at extinction. So, no, I don’t deserve a second chance, but I’m going to fight right to the end side by side with the others.”

  “Good. Because we need you. You have seen things the others haven’t. You understand the alien intelligence in ways they can’t even begin to.”

  “And yet I know nothing,” Rye said.

  “That isn’t true, my friend,” Rask said. “Did I tell you I suffer nightmares?”

  “No.”

  “It is always the same one. I am on that plane, with my mother and the stranger who died in my place. I try to talk to my mother. I try to make her take us off the plane. I beg her to sit in my seat. She never does. And every time, we burn alive in the wreckage. But last night I had that nightmare and it was different for the first time I can remember. I begged her to change seats, and she looked at me and told me I can’t save the world, that it is going to burn. She told me there are no second chances, not really. I know it wasn’t her,” he said. “Before you tell me it is my own conscience taking the blame for what happened beneath that mountain, I know that. I know that it is my fault every bit as much as it is yours. But I know that it is Matthew Langley’s fault, but more than that it is the world’s fault. It is the news we stream into our homes every day. It is the distrust and hatred we let fester for our fellow men, divided by the color of our skins and the gods we choose to believe in. It is the conflicts we have fought throughout our history. The invasions. The civil wars. The genocides. All of these things are inside you. We are the sum of our parts, Rye.” It was the first time Rask had called him by his first name. “We don’t exist in a vacuum. The world we live in shapes us. What that intelligence read was just the truth, filtered through your soul. It was always going to be this way. If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else.”

  Rye nodded. He knew the other man was right. But that didn’t change how he felt.

  “You are a good man. You have suffered more than most could even imagine. And you are still standing.”

  Which was true.

  Rye rubbed at the pink wound, still raw, where the nanites had healed him.

  Rask held out a hand.

  Rye took it.

  “Welcome to the family, Rye. Truly.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “It sounds serious.”

  “I haven’t told you everything that happened down there. It knew me. It called me Kaustubh.”

  “The Guardian of the Stone,” Rask said. He was more than familiar with the legend; he had immersed himself in the secret history of the world. “The legend suggests the fragments of the Cintāmani are drawn to each other, and anyone holding the first will be able to sense the other fragments.”

  Rye nodded. “Legends lie, we know that.”

  “And yet you know where the other Vril are, so perhaps they don’t lie that much?”

  “I don’t know where they are beyond sweeps that could be a thousand miles wide,” Rye said.

  Rask nodded. “But this isn’t what you wanted to confess, is it? Because this isn’t the kind of weight you need to unburden yourself of.”

  “No,” Rye admitted. Rask waited for Rye to fill the silence. “The biomass clones, the Asuras, they weren’t just replicas of dead Nazis growing down there … she was growing me. I saw myself in the gestation tanks. A perfect replica.”

  “Why do I get the feeling there’s another layer to this confession you haven’t owned up to yet?”

  “You’re good at this.”

  “I read people,” Rask agreed. “So, the other shoe?”

  “I saw Cressida Mohr’s half-grown face in there.”

  “Are you sure it was her?”

  “Yes. She was one of them. She fooled me, Rask. We drank. We talked. We fucked. And I couldn’t tell she wasn’t one of us. She was so … I keep wanting to use the word lifelike … but you know what I mean.”

  Rask nodded, understanding the implication. “They have been living among us for the best part of a century. They came back wearing the faces of the Nazis who died out on that mountain, but they have had time and opportunity to become embedded in our society. That she fooled you well enough to get that close to you just proves they have assimilated. They could be anyone. In any level of society. Politicians. They could be our generals. Holy men. Our beloved actors. Faces we see on the television every day. People we trust. They could be anyone and everyone. An alien species living among us, our enemy wearing familiar faces. So convincing in their humanity they could be people we call friends.”

  “Jesus, that’s a frightening thought,” Rye said. “Who the hell are we supposed to trust?”

  “Each other,” Rask said. He winced then, a searing jolt of pain tearing through him as the nanites began to enter his bloodstream. It took him a second to gather his wits. “Beyond that? No one.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Better than that, I am alive. I can feel them inside me. It is the strangest thing. I don’t hurt. Not the way that I did before. These spasms are different. They have a reason. They are down to the nanite healers. The rest—it doesn’t hurt anymore. I can’t remember the last time I was free of pain. Now, if I am lucky, I will live as long as the rest of you. Right now, twelve months feels like a lifetime.” His smile was slight, but there was a gentle humor behind it. Rye appreciated that. “Do you think you can find the Seal of Muhammad in that time?”

  “It’s not like we have a choice,” Rye said. “But on the plus side, we have Byrne. That’s got to count for something. Our very own space archaeologist. So, why the Seal? Why not get Byrne to do his satellite thing over the Amazon or something? Pinpoint the targets without leaving this place?”

  “The second fragment,” Rask explained, “the Syamantaka, is said to protect the land from natural disasters; flood, drought, earthquake, and famine, but more importantly for us, if the myths are to be believed, it is the keystone that opens the door to Agartha, the mythical city buried beneath the Antarctic ice. The Ahnenerbe called it Ultima Thule. We tend to think of it as Hell.”

  “I guess it froze over,” Rye said.

  “Without the second fragment of the Cintāmani, we aren’t getting into Agartha,” Rask said. “And if Agartha is like Shambhala, it needs to be destroyed.”

  “So, we find the Seal.”

  “Which is easier said than done. The problem being Muhammad’s original seal was lost by the Caliph Uthman, in a well in Medina six hundred years before the birth of Christ.”

  “You’re forgetting who I am,” Rye said.

  Rask furrowed his brow.

  “Kaustubh,” he said. He held up the palm of his healing hand with the raw pink scar tissue. “The Guardian of the Stones. If anyone’s going to find the second fragment it is me.”
<
br />   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, I’m indebted to my editor in this madness, Peter Wolverton, who was there with the first email saying, “Why don’t you give me something more like Silver…?” through various incarnations of the pitches and the shaping of the story line, with red pen and incisive opinions that helped to form Rye’s story. More often than not, Pete came in with important ideas about how to get the most out of this story. It’s fair to say that without him the book in your hands would be a pale shadow of itself. So, cheers, mate.

  Then, after Pete, there’s Jen Donovan, who didn’t make it right the way to the end—she didn’t die, don’t panic, she’s off doing spectacular things with Penguin Random House Audio now. (Huzzah!) Jen ran interference between me and Pete for the last three years, making sure that things went smoothly, that deadlines were hit, edits turned around, and stupid questions answered. Thanks, Jen, for just being all-around awesome. I hope you have an amazing time in the new gig and smile when you turn the last page of this book and realize how much you are appreciated. I’m going to miss you, and feel just a little pang of jealousy of all the cool new writers you’ll be working with.

  I’ve made no secret of the fact I struggle with depression and over the last few years it has become harder and harder to focus my thoughts and really see the shape of a story. This isn’t the kind of thing your editor wants to hear, so hide this page from him, ta.… First drafts had begun to feel like a trial by attrition, with what used to take a week taking a month and what used to take a month taking three. There was a time not so far back when my concentration was so fractured I seriously began to doubt I’d ever be able to do this again. Little did I know that my obsession with gadgets would save my life. It sounds melodramatic, but right at the beginning of this process I took delivery of a Freewrite, which for those of you remotely curious enough to read this far, is basically an old-fashioned typewriter with a small e-ink screen that’s hooked up to the Wi-Fi. It can’t connect to Facebook or surf the internet or anything else. But it does what it says on the can, and it does it wonderfully well—to the point that I found myself writing with a freedom that I haven’t felt in years. It’s got this neat little gimmick that I thought would be infuriating, but which is brilliant: you can only write forward. There are no cursors, you can’t pop back a couple of lines to fix a scene or add some cool little detail, which actually focuses the mind and forces you to really see and immerse yourself in the writing in a way that I haven’t been able to since my first laptop with Wi-Fi left me permanently connected to the internet and all of its distractions. So, right up there with Pete, there’s this box with keys. White Peak wasn’t the first novel written on a Freewrite, far from it, and it won’t be the last, but it stands as a testimony to what distraction-free writing can do for you. And no, I’m not on commission. But, Astrohaus guys … if you wanna send me a freebie Freewrite2 when you get there … I wouldn’t say no …

  I think here I need to take a moment to thank the people who’ve been there along the way, starting with the old friends who put up with my first pitiful attempts to tell stories, so to the Sunday gang who came around to role-play their way through my mad ideas, Simon, Gary, Ian, and Michael—you were good guys to grow up with. I kinda miss the simplicity of those days and having you guys in my life. Then, there are the champions, those people who believed, from the first person to buy a short story of mine, Jason Smith, at Exuberance magazine, to the first editor to put down money for an actual novel of mine, David Nordhaus and Butch Miller at Dark Tales. David Howe, who bought Houdini’s Last Illusion at a time when I’d lost my agent and was seriously thinking about calling it a day. Lindsey Priestley, who took a chance on my first mass-market novels, bringing me into the Warhammer world and letting me play with the vampire counts for a few years. Tim Schulte for panicking when Stel and I sold him Rapture and realized we couldn’t actually do it because of Stel’s noncompete clause and his long overdue contract, and who said “Well, can you give me something like The Da Vinci Code?” when he could have said give me my money back … and which led to Silver being one of the top thirty bestselling novels in the UK that year. And to Emma Barnes who helped pull the Ogmios Directive from the ashes nearly a decade later to help get it over the finish line.

  Then there are the guys who’ve had my pen and my back, first my Ogmios Directive cowriters, Steve Lockley, Richard Salter, David Wood, Ashley Knight, Rick Chesler, Sean Ellis, then more long-suffering writer friends unlucky enough to have collaborated down the years: Paul Ebbs, Willie Meikle, Joseph Nassise, José Bográn, David Sakmyster, Brian M. Logan, Brian D. Anderson (what’s it with Brians and middle initials?) Aaron Rosenberg, and Robert Greenberger. All of these fine folks are brilliant writers in their own right, and I’m lucky to call them friends.

  And, at the far end of things, the people who keep me sane. My family. My wife, Marie, who has no idea what I actually do for a living and dreads the question because she really doesn’t know how to explain it. Pat, who pops up in all of these, my nemesis in the Fantasy Football League. Mum, who is a dedicated first reader. Dad, who sadly supports Chelsea but is otherwise okay. My little sisters, Sarah and Amy, who are busy putting the world to rights and are quite brilliant people. Stefan, Mike, and Thomas, who are my excuse for not working most days.

  I’ll shut up now.

  With luck we’ll get to meet again not too far from now, and get to talk about what happens next.…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  In another life, RONAN FROST worked for the British Ministry of Defence. During the last year of the Cold War, his main duties involved liaison with intelligence operatives working behind the Iron Curtain, and after glasnost and perestroika changed the geopolitical face of the Eastern Bloc, he found himself working mainly with the Royal Navy during Operation Granby in the first Gulf War. After leaving, he worked alongside economic experts developing a plan for rationalization and centralization of the British Royal Navy, which was presented to the House of Commons. Retired from that life, he lives in Europe with his wife and dog, enjoying a much quieter life. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four


  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  Seventy-Six

  Seventy-Seven

  Seventy-Eight

  Seventy-Nine

  Eighty

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WHITE PEAK. Copyright © 2019 by Steven Savile. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Cover design by James Iacobelli

  Cover art: photograph of mountain © Daniel

  Prude K/Shutterstock.com; map © Architecteur/Shutterstock.com

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-13008-2 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-13009-9 (ebook)

  eISBN 9781250130099

  Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: May 2019