HEAVEN WILL FALL

  GRAVITIUM™ BOOK ONE

  MICHAEL ANDERLE

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  This book 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. Sometimes both.

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  LMBPN Publishing

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  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  Version 1.00, March 2023

  eBook ISBN: 979-8-88878-126-5

  Print ISBN: 979-8-88878-127-2

  THE HEAVEN WILL FALL TEAM

  Thanks to our Beta Team

  John Ashmore, Kelly O’Donnell, Rachel Beckford, Malyssa Brannon

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  Christopher Gilliard

  Dorothy Lloyd

  Veronica Stephan-Miller

  Zacc Pelter

  Wendy L Bonell

  Deb Mader

  Peter Manis

  Paul Westman

  Billie Leigh Kellar

  Jan Hunnicutt

  Editor

  The SkyFyre Editing Team

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Author Notes

  Books By Michael Anderle

  PROLOGUE

  “Get up, maggot!”

  His eyes snapped open. Ribs hurt and fingers tingled in the icy cold of the dark room. Nothing made sense until he heard the crackle and whine of the stun baton being held over his head.

  He was on his feet in an instant, barely missing the baton strike to his arms. His whole body ached and screamed in protest, but he pushed himself forward. He’d learned the bastards weren’t really as sadistic as they’d seemed at first. They wouldn’t hold back with their strikes, but they were fair in dealing them out.

  They were being prepared for the outside world. A tough, unforgiving place. Anything less in their training would be a lie that could get them killed.

  The words rang through his skull as two more kids tripped over the obstacle course. Trevor and Carina. He knew them from the sounds they made when the trainers descended on them, batons at the ready.

  Anselm had bet that they would flunk out in three months or less, and he felt more and more confident that his credits were safe. Carina managed to push to her feet, but Trevor remained on the ground, panting and trying to drag himself across the sand.

  It wouldn’t do him any good. Anselm pushed harder, ignoring the crackle and whine of the stun batons. He jumped clear of the first three rungs of the ladder and scrambled up the knots on the rope. His cold, sweaty fingers almost lost their grip when he came across the other side, but he hung on. The last time he’d missed the vault, he’d landed in the infirmary for two weeks with a broken collarbone. Catching up after two weeks had been close to impossible, but he was back at the top of his class.

  He skidded to a halt in front of a small plastic table and collected the weapon waiting for him. There were seven others for eight more students. The last one to the table would receive an automatic fail. He hadn’t been hit with one of those since he learned the hard way that he would go without his lunch.

  The bots on the other side of the table stared at him listlessly while Anselm slotted the mag into place and chambered a round. They’d been designed to look as close to humans as possible, but they still haunted his nightmares.

  Not only because they hit him with a stun gun if he picked the wrong bot to shoot or if he took too long. There was something unsettling about those pale, unseeing, unfeeling faces that watched him, judged him, and marked him as unworthy.

  There were no tricks for dealing with them. No one way to do it. He could hear the drill instructors starting to catch up while the rest of his class worked their way through the obstacle course. He took his time picking his target out, though his gut told him the one he wanted was the middle one to the left, a little farther back than the rest of them. He’d learned to listen to those instincts over his first few years in the Academy.

  He couldn’t show the rest of the kids which one was the bad bot, but he could wait for them to watch. He had thirty seconds from the moment he slotted his magazine in before he was tagged with the stun gun, and he patiently counted those seconds out. At five seconds, the rest of his class was catching up. He raised his weapon.

  They were close enough. He couldn’t help the one who came last. Trevor, probably. Still, they didn’t have the same instincts he did. He could help them pick the right bot, even if it covered the damage up the moment he opened fire.

  The pistol kicked in his hand and flashed green to tell him he’d chosen correctly. He put the weapon back down and started on the second half of the course. Six of the others already knew to watch and follow his lead. Carina missed, and she screamed and dropped to the ground, spasming.

  Not much he could do about that. Not if someone didn’t want his help.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Field-stripping and cleaning my weapon, Drill Instructor!” Anselm answered in as loud a voice as he could muster. It wasn’t much more than a squeak since his throat and sinuses were acting up with the cold. He couldn’t afford to lose any more time in the nurse’s office, though.

  “You think I’m stupid, Candidate Horst?”

  “No, Drill Instructor!”

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “No, Drill Instructor!”

  The DI slammed his fist on the table. Anselm didn’t flinch. That would earn him a baton to the ribs as quickly as presenting a dirty weapon. He continued oiling the round replacement mechanism.

  “You think you can help your classmates beat the obstacle course? Are you going to be there when they’re adjudicators, too? Telling them when and where to find murderers?”

  He knew better than to look up from his work.

  “You know your target. Shoot fast. If the others can’t cut it, don’t make it easy for them.”

  “We’re a team, Drill Instructor!” Anselm slapped the replacement mechanism into his pistol and presented the older man with his weapon. “I don’t win until we all win!”

  “This isn’t a game, Horst!” The instructor inspected his weapon closely, his visor scanning every nook and cranny. “The adjudicators who graduate this program are the ones who’ll be out there watching your back when shit hits the fan. You think the ones you need to babysit are going to be any good at it? If they can’t do it on their own, they don’t deserve to wear our colors, maggot! Do it again!”

  He slammed the weapon down, and Anselm smoothly took it apart. He wasn’t supposed to help his teammates? How the hell did that work?

  Anselm snapped out of bed and went through his morning routine almost before he was fully awake. Drill in something enough times, and his brain didn’t even need to interject before he poured his caffeine shake from the blender.

  Dreams of his training regimen were regular. He hadn’t thought about the bad bot obstacle course for a long time. He didn’t like thinking about it, but it was where he’d learned to trust his instincts.

  It took him longer to understand why he wasn’t supposed to help his classmates. He thought they were on the same team. He’d needed to graduate from the Academy to understand what his drill instructor had talked about.

  Adjudicators were a team. It was them against the world. The finest law enforcement agency ever conceived. His classmates weren’t adjudicators. He’d seen more than a few who’d graduated but weren’t cut out for the work.

  The best ones dropped out before they caused too much damage. The worst got other adjudicators, their teammates, killed in the line of duty through their negligence. Anselm shook his head, finished his shake, and dressed in his uniform.

  Them against the world. He wasn’t sure where the council stood on that. Considering how often they called on him to explain the basics of his work versus how often they let him keep doing it, he had to ass
ume they were against him.

  He couldn’t say that outright. People got angry when he pointed out facts to them.

  He pulled his coat on over his uniform and slotted his pistol into its holster. His instructions still stood. Act the part that people expected from adjudicators, answer any question put to him directly, and make it back to his desk as quickly as possible.

  People also got angry when he acted bored during council proceedings. Maybe that would keep them from calling him away from his work in the future.

  CHAPTER ONE

  This was unnecessary. If they wanted him to come down to the Collective Council of Summerland, he might as well have had an office there.

  No, instead, the old fuckers wanted him to wander through marble halls to tell them all would be well. They would sweat the problems they had nothing to do with, shit they’d only heard about and would never have a vital understanding of.

  Anselm raised an eyebrow. Literal marble halls. They’d told him to be at the CCS at eleven in the morning sharp. He knew better than to arrive late since they would take exception to it. He’d been waiting for forty-five minutes while they gathered and went through the required bureaucratic nonsense before a proper meeting.

  The sergeant-at-arms in front of the door stared at him as he stood his ground. People were uncomfortable around adjudicators. He’d heard too many tall tales to count.

  Those rumors came to the forefront of their minds when an adjudicator stepped through the door. Anselm wasn’t psychic, but he saw the thoughts going through the young sergeant’s mind when he refused to take a seat like the others who’d been told to wait in the antechamber. Could he read minds? What could he pick up on? Could he detect treason against Summerland? If so, what would he do if he saw a hint of dissension? Could he jump through walls and tear a grown man’s heart out with his bare hands?

  It sounded ridiculous when discussed out loud, but the thoughts resided in the quietness of everyone’s minds. The sergeant tried not to let any of it show, but his right cheek twitched. His fingers tapped the weapon on his hip, and his gaze flicked to the walls and paintings around him when he thought the adjudicator spotted him staring.

  Anselm didn’t mind the stares. It happened whenever he was in uniform. People grew nervous wherever he went, and they disliked not knowing what he was capable of. They didn’t quite believe the stories, but the tales had to have come from somewhere, right?

  Their anxiety made his job a hell of a lot easier. His life was difficult enough. A time might come to enjoy life outside his work, but he wasn’t looking forward to it. Too much time and effort had gone into joining the adjudicator ranks to focus on anything else for the next decade or so.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  He blinked and looked down at the young sergeant. It seemed like a breach of protocol, but talking to someone else was a welcome break from the conversations held in his head.

  “If you must.”

  The sergeant blanched as if he needed all his willpower to keep from openly flinching. “Is it true that you can read minds?”

  Anselm raised an eyebrow but otherwise didn’t let his amusement show. He couldn’t. He was trained in a variety of means to uncover the truth when dealing with other humans, but he wasn’t psychic the way people assumed. He doubted other mutants were, either.

  He had a simple out for this discussion. While he trusted the Armed Forces, he knew the sergeant would repeat whatever he said to his fellow soldiers, and it would spread beyond.

  “I cannot discuss what tools the Collective Council has seen fit to grant me.”

  The smooth deflection would fuel more rumors. The more people who thought he could read minds, the more they would decide lying to him was a pointless exercise.

  “Right. Right. Can you tell me anything about what it’s like to be an adjudicator? I’ve been thinking about applying for the program.”

  That seemed reasonable. He’d asked the same question when he’d applied. He’d been about five years younger than this sergeant, but there was no age limit. The Agency preferred their candidates younger. However, some of their best applied after a long military career.

  He briefly scanned the young man. In the early days, he’d have needed five minutes for the famed ‘scan,’ gathering the intelligence he was supposed to look for and fitting the files together in his head. These days, he needed only a few seconds. The information gathered and seemed to talk to him in a way most people found unnatural and borderline mutated. Which was one more reason they mistrusted adjudicators.

  “You’re not asthmatic.” Anselm smiled. “You won’t have to put that on your application. Your girlfriend has a cat, which you’re allergic to. You will need to disclose that.”

  The sergeant’s eyebrows shot up, and he stepped back. Allergies could be disqualifying but weren’t automatic. Asthma was an automatic DQ for the safety of the candidates.

  “And I think they are waiting for me in there.”

  The young man blinked and seemed to recall what his current line of work was. He tapped the earpiece he’d almost forgotten he was wearing. A soft buzz sounded and continued until he pulled the door open for Anselm to step through.

  He was a good kid. Decent for the Armed Forces. That goodness would be battered and beaten out of him in the Adjudicator Candidate Program.

  Anselm entered the room. The semi-circle of twenty-eight older men and women opening out before him was a familiar sight. They wanted a member of the Adjudicator Justice Agency to complain to about the Summerland’s dire needs, and he’d drawn the short straw this time. It meant putting his cases on hold so he could assure them they were maintaining the brightest jewel in the Network of Ascended Cities.

  Nobody liked to talk more than these people. The group represented every borough in Summerland, and they’d been elected because they could talk for hours about what was best for the people. The greatest ones could continue for hours without saying anything of note.

  “Senior Adjudicator Anselm Horst, presented before the Collective Council of Summerland,” the clerk announced in a tired but official-sounding voice. “May he approach the well?”

  The council held a quick electronic vote and approved his approach to the center of the semi-circle, where the members towered over him in their comfortable leather seats.

  Anselm stood at his full height, hands tucked behind his back as he stared firmly into any councilman’s eyes who would meet his gaze. None did for long, and a few sank farther into their seats to avoid him.

  It was good to know their reputation held in the eyes of those who should have known the facts over the rumors.

  “SA Anselm Horst.” The Speaker addressed him first. She leaned closer to the screen in front of her and adjusted her glasses. “You were summoned here today to be informed of and act against dire prognostications regarding the future of Summerland. Do you accept the mission we place before you?”

  The clerk cleared his throat and cut in before he could answer. “Any answer in the affirmative will be an acceptance of the inherent confidentiality implied in such missions.”

  If they were stating it outright, he didn’t think any such confidentiality was implied. It sounded explicit to him, but he didn’t understand most of the legalities and technicalities the specialists came up with when writing out meeting conduct.

  He’d never been written up for sharing classified information, intentional or not, but they had to dot their umlauts.