ALLIANCE: A Timewalker Novel

By Michele Callahan

For centuries aliens have waged a covert war for control of Earth using time travel as a weapon. A select group of humans become their soldiers, genetically modified pawns destined to be caught in the crossfire. But this time, the pawns have a plan of their own...and the fate of all mankind rests in their hands.
M.L. Callahan is a science fiction fanatic, a full-time author, and currently resides in Colorado. The Timewalker Chronicles is a series ten years in the making featuring time travel, aliens, special ops, genetic engineering, action, adventure, danger, gadgets, spaceships, and romance. Don't miss it!
Fans of complex world building, alternate realities, and non-stop action won't want to miss Callahan's books!

"Unique, intriguing and impossible to put down." - Nerdy Girl Book Reviews

Fans of Kresley Cole's Immortals After Dark, Sherrilyn Kenyon's League Series, or Karen Marie Moning's Fever Series will not be able to resist Callahan's complex world building, twisting plot lines, or unique premise. Callahan writes something brand new in the science fiction arena with character driven stories that read more like adventure books than hard science manuals. The Timewalker Chronicles are like nothing you've ever read before. Don't miss this series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michele Callahan
• Release date: Sep 23, 2015

Michele Callahan

M.L. Callahan is a sci-fi fanatic and full time writer whose earliest movie memories are of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and light sabers. (Still waiting on Santa to come through on that one.) Fans of Hugh Howey's Wool series, Wayward Pines, Kresley Cole's Immortals After Dark, Sherrilyn Kenyon's League Series, or Karen Marie Moning's Fever Series will not be able to resist Callahan's complex world building, twisting plot lines, or unique premise. Callahan writes something brand new in the science fiction arena with character driven stories that read more like adventure books than hard science manuals. The Timewalker Chronicles are like nothing you've ever read before. Don't miss Callahan's books. Connect with M. L. Callahan: Twitter: twitter.com/ML_Callahan Facebook: facebook.com/AuthorMLCallahan Website: mlcallahan.com Goodreads: goodreads.com/michele_callahan Email: [e-mail]

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ALLIANCE

A Timewalker Novel

by M. L. Callahan

Copyright © 2015 by M. L. Callahan

All Rights Reserved

Copyright

ALLIANCE, A Timewalker Novel

Cover design Copyright 2015 by Damonza

First Edition. September 2015

ISBN-13:978-1-941518-06-9

Copyright 2015 by M.L. Callahan

Published By M.L. Callahan/Tydbyts Media

All rights reserved.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, people, places and events are completely a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

~Celestina’s Journal~

The Crux is coming. The timelines will converge. The final battle for control of Earth will happen, again. It is inevitable. It’s why we are here. This is our last chance to save both the Earth and our home world. The coming battle is the reason we risked our lives to travel to this time. It’s the reason we followed him…

Droghan. The enemy. Firstborn son of the ancient Queen, first to be born with the curse, and the first to be exiled. This is Droghan’s fight, his vengeance. His war. He came back through time to steal the Timewalker’s victory, to change his destiny, and ours. Every moment of every day, for hundreds of years, he has hunted for Her. He hunts, even now. But he cannot find her.

Neither can we.

Droghan is willing to murder billions of innocents in his attempts to kill her.

The first Timewalker Queen must rise and claim the Itaran throne. Only she can defeat Queen Nelina. Only she can vanquish Droghan and his army. Only she can ensure humanity’s survival.

As the Crux draws near, he has become increasingly desperate. His newest attack will kill billions to ensure the death of those he fears. A vision of his attack, of the Red Death, has descended upon me. This is a virus unlike any other. It will kill nearly every man, woman, and child on the planet.

He cannot be allowed to recast our history, to steal our victory. He must not be allowed to exterminate the Timewalker lineage on Earth.

I have seen visions of the new future he seeks to create, Itarans locked in a bloody civil conflict, Queen Nelina reigniting the Forgotten War with the Others, and Droghan’s armies swarming over both worlds, mindless and lost, turning everyone they encounter to ash.

He must be stopped.

If he succeeds, both worlds will fall.

Prologue

The seemingly endless rain splattered the windshield of her baby brother’s brand-new, bright yellow Mustang. Alexa downshifted into a sharp curve on the 101 Highway, the steering wheel vibrating in her hands as the engine slowed the car. The smell of new leather and plastic permeated every pore. The sleek dashboard looked like the inside of a spaceship, not the dashboard of an assembly-line hot rod out of Michigan. She was less than an hour outside of Astoria, and racing along the winding highway as if the Grim Reaper himself were chasing her. Maybe he was.

Alexa had discovered the truth about her life, and her destiny, when she was nine years old. Since then? Well, since then she’d just been waiting to discover if provenance and circumstance would ever align to seal her fate.

She accelerated out of the curve and punched the gas pedal down in frustration. According to her mother, her date with destiny was well past due. They had come for her mother when she was twenty-two years old. Taken her grandmother at nineteen. Alexa was already twenty-six and feeling like the last girl without a date to the prom.

What the hell are you waiting for? she screamed into the night air, her window open in defiance of the cold, spitting rain that hit her face. Like the rest of the Pacific Northwest, living along the Oregon coast in winter was like living inside a cloud where the sunshine never penetrated and raindrops hovered in the air, content to allow humanity to live among them.

Stretch jeans and knee-high boots kept her legs from getting too cold. Her long hair was woven into a braid, which she’d pulled forward over her right shoulder. Like most Oregonians, she had learned to dress in layers. Plain cotton T-shirt under a sweater, and everything covered by a thigh-length rainproof jacket with a hoodie.

Only her face and hands were exposed, and cold. But she welcomed the rush. Her brother, David, had offered her the keys to his car for a spin, and she had jumped at the chance, desperate to get away from her three-year-old niece’s birthday party. Her entire family was there, all four of her younger brothers, two of her brothers’ wives, two beautiful nieces, and her parents. All chatting and happy and planning their lives. Living their lives.

Alexa downshifted to rev up the engine and dug her boot heel into the carpeted floor mat so she could press her foot to the accelerator. Hard. The car’s back tires fishtailed around a sharp curve. She didn’t slow down. She smiled.

The problem wasn’t the cake or kisses, it was the inevitability that hung over her head and kept her separate from all of them. According to her mother, Archivers were part of a race of immortal aliens that tracked and recruited humans who were different. Humans like her. The Archivers tracked her family’s lineage for one very incredible reason, the women in her family could survive travelling through time. So, her mother, her grandmother, and the incredible women who came before, her matriarchal line, had been tracked and recruited, like a secret army, to protect the Earth from disasters. Some of those disasters had been the result of mankind’s own mistakes. But others? The Archivers claimed that Earth was simply caught in the crossfire, that in some cases, humanity’s suffering was caused by a war between the Archivers and their enemies.

Who those enemies were and exactly what they wanted was where her mom got a bit fuzzy on the details.

She raced around a tight curve and headlights flashed in front of her, appearing out of nowhere. Her heart jumped as the roar of wet tires on pavement preceded three cars speeding past her, one right after the other.

That fuzzy area had always made Alexa nervous. From the day her power had manifested, her mother had offered lots of information, but no real answers. Who were the Archivers? Where were they from? Who were they fighting? How long had they been on Earth?

And how was it possible that no one knew they were here? Where was the all-powerful government surveillance system? And not just the U.S. What about Russia or China? Was all of Europe clueless as well? Or did they know and choose to keep it secret in some massive, international conspiracy?

And just how many Timewalkers were there? Women just like her. Marked and waiting.

Alexa loosened her death grip on the steering wheel and lifted her right hand to rub her chest where she knew the birthmark colored her skin. Her mother insisted it was a mark of honor, of a higher calling.

More like a cattle brand.

The cold rain hit her cheek and ear like tiny needlelike darts of ice. They pricked and stung, coming in the window at over seventy miles an hour, then melted into a nagging chill. But Alexa didn’t mind the cold making her cheek go numb, or the wet. It made her feel alive.

She pushed the car until the wheels broke contact with the pavement and she started to lose control. Recovered. It was reckless and she knew it. She was tired of waiting, tired of wondering if every goodbye she said to her family would be the last.

Just tired. She couldn’t date, couldn’t fall in love, didn’t dare make plans beyond tomorrow. All she could do was train. Train with guns, with knives, and in hand-to-hand combat. Endless training. She memorized history books and kept herself in shape. And she waited.

With a sigh, she slowed the car to a reasonable speed and looked for a turn-out area with enough room to turn the car around. It was time to go back to the party, and the cake, and three-year-old kisses that made her heart hurt.

She flipped the car around and turned on the radio, worn-out by the thoughts chasing their tails in circles inside her head.

She didn’t see the delivery truck until it was too late. Blue, gold and white decorated the truck’s hood and trailer with the logo of a local brewery. The driver was collapsed over the steering wheel so she couldn’t make out his face. He had a dark baseball cap on his head, which had slumped to the side to be caught between the top of the steering wheel and the side window.

The truck was heading straight at her.

Alexa swerved and accelerated, trying to dodge the truck before it could hit her in the much smaller car. The truck’s cab and front wheel sped past her and her heart leapt. Maybe she could make it.

The bottom of the white trailer was even with the top of her head. She sped past it, her right tires hitting the gravel on the edge of the road. The steering wheel jumped in her hands as the car tried to get away from her. A couple more feet and she’d be gone, hundreds of feet down into the roaring surf.

A wall of rotating black appeared next to the driver’s door, then slammed into the car. The airbag exploded, knocking her head back and breaking her hold on the steering wheel. The smell of burnt dust and wet tires filled the car.

The gravel caught and tugged at the right tires and the car went into a spin as the truck’s back end pushed the car over the edge.

Her head reeling from impact, time seemed to stop as the car hung suspended, half over the cliff.

Then her stomach was in her throat as the car started to fall. The roar of the surf pounding the rocks below seemed unnaturally loud, as if it were taunting her. She had seconds left in this life, and she wished with all her heart that she’d been better. A better daughter. A better sister. A better student. Just better.

She opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out.

Everything froze. The sea went silent. Her own horrified scream hung suspended as a spark of bright light appeared beside her.

Her mother had told her this was how it would happen, this was how the Archiver would come for her. This moment of silence would transport her to another time and into danger. Alexa thought that she was prepared for the pain of leaving everyone behind, but the reality was a hard strike, like a sledgehammer crushing her rib cage. The heat of a single tear slid down her cold cheek to vanish, consumed by the wet streaks of rain on her face.

If she’d been able to move, the pain would have made her limbs weak and her body crumble. The Archiver had come, at last, to take her.

She would be gone from this time. There would be no body. No funeral. No goodbyes.

Just gone.

Chapter One

Five years later…

Droghan stepped through the portal to stand in the center of his small ship’s cockpit. The power he commanded tugged and stretched his skin as he exited the cold nothingness of the interdimensional portal, as if the bony fingers of empty space weren’t quite ready to release him.

Outside the hull, his small ship groaned beneath the weight of a hundred and fifty feet of fresh ice melt. The surrounding glaciers fed a network of small rivers that glittered like silver thread when viewed from above.

His ship rested at the bottom of Lake Kucherla in a remote region of Siberia’s Altia Mountains, where only experienced guides could lead adventure-minded tourists in on horseback. Even now, in late spring, the surface of the lake was frozen solid, the crisp greenish-blue color of the ice unmarred by humans.

The frigid chill stirred memories best forgotten and a shiver raced over his skin. A handful of small glowing lights on the pilot’s control station were all that kept him from stepping into complete darkness. His breath created a dense stream of fog in the air as he exhaled. This cold was centuries old and it cut bone deep, settling over him just like the infinite and empty cold of deep space. A scent in the air teased the tip of his tongue with the metallic tang of metal grinding on metal. Of blood.

But this ship hadn’t been in space in centuries. In fact, it hadn’t left this water in over a hundred years. The air inside had been recycled and filtered, pushed through the same ducts with the same dust motes floating within it for a very long time. The whole place smelled like a tomb. Undisturbed. Silent. Waiting.

In this ancient space, the past rose up to haunt him, the now silent souls of hundreds thickened the air. It never mattered how far he traveled, or how long ago they had fallen, their memory chased him through time, pursued him without mercy, and judged him for his failures.

With every visit, ancient anger rose to choke him. Here, he could still smell the past, could still hear Itaran battle cries echoing in his mind with the screams of the dying. The sickly sweet, acrid odor of hundreds of Itaran Immortals burned to ash.

The scent lingered, as if the floor and walls had absorbed the souls of those lost and captured their essence so that he would never forget his defeat. So they could haunt him.

Death and failure surrounded him, added iron to his spine. The creak of protesting metal vibrated up through his boots as the ship’s programming responded to his presence, reactivating systems that had been lying dormant for months. Images flickered behind his eyelids, memories surging inside his mind like a flash flood of pain and regrets. Mistakes.

Droghan leaned forward, both hands on the control panels, his head hanging down as he shoved the pain back down, logic winning the internal battle for control. Those lost souls were irrelevant now. This was another time, another battle. This time, things would be different.

Lights, level 5. A hundred small track lights lit up the creases and seams of the flight control deck. The soft, bluish-white hue helped pull his mind back to the present. He stepped toward the high-backed gray seat to his right. The ship was small by Itaran standards, a personal cruiser with enough room for three or four passengers and two pilots. Nothing more. The flight control room consisted of two chairs, one each for a pilot and a copilot, and barely enough space to walk around the seats in a crouch, all of the ceiling controls low enough to be within reach of a seated pilot. Satisfied that all of the controls appeared to be in perfect working order, he slid into the curved pilot’s seat thankful for the thick layers of clothing that insulated him from the ice-cold press of the creaking material against his back.

He didn’t bother turning around to inspect the rear wall of the room. Years before, he had filled that space with charts and data, in a futile attempt to track his prey. He didn’t need to look at them. He had them memorized, but in seven centuries they hadn’t helped him achieve his goal.

Worse, he was almost out of time, and he still hadn’t found her. If he couldn’t find the Timewalker, he couldn’t kill her. And he needed to kill her.

Wrapping the dark gray travelling cloak more tightly around his frame, he made sure the Archiver insignia on the chest of his uniform was hidden from view. He needed to make a call, and he didn’t want the woman on the other side of the screen to know where to find him. Earth was a big place. If Nelina knew where he slept most nights, he might just be too tempting a target.

Reaching forward, he powered up the small spaceship’s communications center and entered the personal access code that the Queen of Itara had given him so many years ago.

As usual, she made him wait, because she could. Because she didn’t want him to forget, for even a moment, that he was lesser. Droghan leaned back and arched his neck, the frozen headrest was like an ice cube pressed to the back of his skull. A heavy blanket of silence settled around him for nearly twenty minutes before she responded to his call.

Droghan. To what do I owe this great honor? Queen Nelina’s head and shoulders filled the view screen before him. He caught a very small glimpse of plush white bedding and pillows behind her. She was in her personal chambers on Itara. Her gown was purest white and glittered with shaved crystals that had been imbedded in the soft silk. Her black hair was perfectly coiffed for presentation to the Itaran ruling body, the Seven Circles, of which she was their head. Her dark eyes were cunning, and her physical beauty as startling as he remembered.

He remained unmoved by her appearance. He knew, too well, what lay beneath.

Are you alone? He could see no one moving behind her on the screen, but that didn’t mean she was truly alone. Still, he had to be careful. They both had enemies on Itara, and those enemies had spies everywhere.

Of course.

The Crux draws near, Nelina. We are nearly out of time.

So you claim.

I have already proven to you, many times over. Don’t start this futile argument again.

Her smile was indulgent, her tone patronizing. You have proven useful. As I have told you before, I am willing to believe that you travelled through time and ended up hundreds of years in the past. I even believe that the Archivers followed you. But I refuse to believe I will be defeated by a human.

The Timewalker will kill you, Nelina. I watched you die. The events that led to your death are inevitable unless we can find and eliminate the Timewalker.

You don’t really expect me to fear a little human girl, do you?

Then you’re a fool.

No, I am a Queen. She lifted her chin so she could stare down her nose at him. As if that would make him feel small. Earth is not so very far away. Call me a fool again, and I’ll make sure that shitty little smirk is still on your face when I take your head.

Nelina, this is not a game. The threat is real. And I’m warning you, I will wipe out the entire human race, if that’s what it takes, to make sure she dies.

You’ll do no such thing. I need the Timewalkers alive.

Why?

That is none of your concern.

Oh, yes. He’d heard that before. So, you intend to do nothing? You’re going sit on your throne and hope this war doesn’t reach you? Hope that the Timewalkers simply surrender? That the humans go down without a fight? He leaned forward, his knuckles white where they wrapped around the ends of the armrests. "Do you want to die, Nelina?"

Watch your tongue with me, Droghan. We were friends once, so I will overlook your arrogance. Her smile faded and her beauty disappeared behind a cruel twist of her lips. They had never been friends. Lovers? Accomplices? Yes. But never friends. I have already taken precautions. As have you. There is nothing more to be done.

It was his turn to smile and know the look would not reach his eyes. Precautions? I assume you are referring to your daughter and the handful of Royal Guard you sent to Earth? That’s your solution? With a soft chuckle he crossed his arms and slouched back into the chair. Inessa is a hot-headed fool. She won’t be able to control those men for long.

Nelina studied him in silence for several long minutes as he waited, arms still crossed, one eyebrow raised. Counting on Inessa to keep her temper in check was like asking a hungry lion to guard a wounded lamb. He was right, and she knew it.

What do you suggest?

Give me access to Inessa’s men.

Nelina rolled her eyes and he gritted his teeth as she spoke. You have been on Earth for a very long time. I am quite sure you have recruited an army of human pawns. Why would you need access to my personal guard?

The humans are weak. You know that. A flicker of agreement flared in her eyes and he leaned forward to press his advantage. "Give me some experienced hunters. Help me catch her for you. I’ll bring her to Itara. You