Armageddon Arising: PLEXIS

By Ivan Kramer

The countdown is on. Forty-five minutes is all Agent Ellie has to stop a disaster.

She's fifteen and unfearing, about to penetrate a classified military installation in the heart of the Mexican mountains where the New Confederation works on their latest secret weapon planning to defeat the Northerners and establish the New States of America. Will she make it? Forty-five minutes: the choice between slavery and freedom, hatred and justice.

Armageddon Arising is a standalone prequel novelette to the PLEXIS series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ivan Kramer
• Release date: Sep 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502254009

Book preview

Also by Ivan Kramer:

Engines of Empire (Plexis: Volume I)

Edge of Evil (Plexis: Volume II)

Plexis Boxed Set

45 minutes before Zero base is compromised. Agent Ellie arrives.

I had forty-five minutes to complete my mission. Forty-five minutes flat, not a second more. After that disaster would strike. The only question remained, which of two hostile parties it was going to exterminate.

I still had a problem. I had to deal with a whole bunch of males who tended to take themselves too seriously by definition. The military. Can you imagine that? A bunch of drill sergeants I had to convince that the situation had by now gotten way out of control. That they had to act fast and in a way totally different from their standard procedure. It's easier for a buffalo to stick his horn through the eye of a needle than for a brass hat to listen to a woman, especially when she tells them to ignore the regs.

Just leave it, I said to myself as I took another swig from my whisky flask. The zeppelin's cockpit was filling with smoke. Soon the whole gondola would be full of it. I had to get out quickly.

I poured some whisky onto my wounded arm, closed the flask and tucked it away into my tunic, then adjusted the large army knife hanging from my belt. The wound started stinging; I shook my arm, then blew on it. It helped somewhat. I took several deep breaths and kicked the gondola's mangled hatch open. The countdown had begun!

Summer heat hovered outside. The hatch tumbled onto the rocks fifteen feet below. The New Feds' surveillance zeppelin had been trapped between the cliffs that framed a small valley deep in the rocky heart of the Plateau of Mexico. The ruins of an abandoned village lay nearby, overgrown with shrubs and weak gnarly trees. The church belltower with a gaping hole in its roof stuck out into the sky.

I looked at the door leading into the gondola's front section. Three people were still there. All three of them dead. The rocket shell fired from a handheld launcher had hit the cockpit with remarkable precision. It was a good job the explosion hadn't ignited the gas: the balloons on these small surveillance zeppelins were quite small and protected with special metal-coated casings: an experimental technology that the New Feds' spies had stolen from a classified Washington DC facility.

I was the only living thing left on the entire zeppelin, and I wasn't going to linger there much longer, either. I'd already wasted two minutes of my allowance. Time to shift it, Agent.

I slid down the hatch and hung in the opening as I checked the valley. I could see a rocky road at its opposite end, far from me and the ruins below. I gave them another look: the belltower, the dark gap in its roof. It looked like a