Young Writers Society

Right-o then. I succumbed to the challenge of trying to write a novel, for various reasons. Now, should I just keep adding chapters here, or make new threads? Just a questions.
Anyway: here it goes.

THE ENDERS

Prologue.
Looking back on the what followed, Gabriel could never be entirely certain that this was where it all started, or, indeed, that it really had a beginning at all. His romantic soul was prone to find older beginnings; ideas born from lofty writings or deep philosophies, but those who remained told him to put it here, just to neaten things up. You could never really win an argument with Gabriel, but Jason always claimed that this time, at least, he had the last laugh, since he wrote the history books.

Interesting. The writing style seems distant, but it makes me curious to see the rest.

His romantic soul was prone to find older beginnings, ideas born from lofty writings or deep philosophies,

Maybe after beginnings a semicolon instead of a comma?

The history books mention seems really different.

For convenience, maybe you could do the rest in the same thread... For all of us too lazy to seek out other things.

The prolouge dosen't really give any information...none at all. I guess I'll have to wait untill you post the first chapter to crit anything.....

And behold, unto you it is given!

Eh. I'm tired.

1.
It was a quiet evening, as quiet as it got in New York; no gunshots, no screams, no crackle of burning buildings; things that people were too used to ignoring, even here. It was a good place to live, a rich one, the kind of place where the billionaires had pushed out the millionaires. Money isn’t always security, however, and people here knew well enough when to stop asking questions, and when not to even think them. Huge buildings hugged the skyline, looking stylish and ill at ease bordering the empty streets. The occasional dark car or shining black robot whirred down the broad roads, but they too seemed furtive, afraid, as if they knew they should be somewhere else. It was an entirely irrational fear, and so, of course, the most likely to be proven true.
The centrepiece of this rich neighbourhood was, appropriately, near the middle of the estate, a large white building surrounded by high fences and rows of savagely glinting razor wire. Grey uniformed guards stood quietly at every entrance, weapons visible on hips and in hands, but even these failed to make the elegant edifice look anything but awe-inspiring. High fluted columns, massive silver studded doors and tall crystal windows combined to make it unforgettable sight, which was just as well: the Manhattan Memorial Conference Centre needed every point in its favour it could get. Conferences are built and carried out on trust, not exactly a common commodity in recent times, and meetings of any sort were generally conducted in smoky rooms behind several layers of locked doors. It was not an ideal state of affairs, but then, what was?

Tonight, however, something was happening. The huge gardens out front were flooded with light, and men and women had been arriving all evening, hurrying into the vast lobby from cars, helicopters, and even the odd plane. Armies of guards, secretaries and advisers scurried through hallways, ants or termites dressed in opposing colours: men with hard faces and truncheons, women with binders clutched tightly to them. It was loud. Nervous sweat and strained voices coloured the air into something ugly and frightening. In the way of most of these things, everyone seemed to know that something was happening, but no-one knew exactly what. Tension was a way of life for these people, but this was something else.
Somewhere near the middle of the building, the main conference room was buzzing with just as much strain, if less noise. A huge table dominated the room, a gigantic piece of oak embedded with computer terminals. More screens were mounted high up on the wall, some blank for the moment, others showing economic printouts or share-price indexes. Fifty or so people were sat around, emitting a low hum of worried conversation, but no-one seemed to be saying very much to anyone, and many faces were turned inwards, staring fixedly at the table-top or walls. It was an air of waiting, of people trying to expect the unexpected.

The man they were waiting for was watching them expressionlessly from one of the balconies circling the hall. It was a wonder, he thought, that they were all here at all, but, against his expectations, every one of the fifty had turned up. There were points when he had been sure that nothing short of physical force would get them this far. It was, he reflected, half the battle won, but at the cost of making failure that much more dangerous. Angels crawled up the walls, smiling openly at him, carved stone faces showing so much more emotion than his could afford; the devils of the moment were not so visible. It was not an especially comforting thought, nor one to dwell on. He turned away to the flight of stairs leading downwards, still thinking.
Before the main door into the hall he paused, wondering exactly what he hoped to get out this, wondering exactly what he was starting. Prescience was not was of his talents, but there was a flicker of something big at the end of this, and it worried him; not because he wasn’t capable of dealing with it, but because he wasn’t sure where it would end, or, indeed, what it would end up as. Shaking his head, he pushed the door inward on its silent, carefully oiled hinges.

The sound in the hall cut off as if someone had thrown a switch. Every eye turned towards the newcomer: some angry, some afraid, many confused, but every single one wondering something, and fearing something else. At first sight, James Gabriel was not a man to inspire such fear; unease, perhaps, a sense of something not entirely showing, that hint of knowing much more than he would ever tell. It was a strange aura, outwardly calm, never far from danger, violence. A coiled spring did not do it justice: an inactive missile would have suited him better.
He was dressed soberly, with a black business suit and dress shoes; his head was bare, showing thick black hair. His eyes, when you were close enough to see them, were blue: not a brilliant, storybook blue, but dull and darkish, quietly blue, with any fire or sparkle well hidden. It was a plain façade, decorated only by a long black cane he carried, wrapped around in sliver writing. People could have disturbing thoughts looking at that cane, not just because they couldn’t read the writing - which most couldn’t - but because people felt like they should. It was a general reaction to James; you felt as if you ought to know something about him: it was obvious, you just couldn’t quite place it.

Gabriel put his cane down on the table with an audible click, and surveyed the room once again. Up and down the table, fingers were gripping whatever solid object they could find, jaws were clenching, eyes were flickering this way and that. They were some of the most powerful people in the world, and they were afraid. For the briefest of moments, he let them tremble; then he spoke.
“I am the reason you are all here tonight, or at least part of it.” He spoke quietly, and every neck craned to hear him better. Power, he thought, and how it is controlled. More vital now that ever.
“You know what I am,” he went on, “but not who, and that is how it will stay; that is how it must stay. I am here because I need something from you, but don’t imagine that I come begging; there are good reasons all around you, and I will give you more tonight.”
Subtley, the atmosphere of the room was changing. Gabriel could use fear when he wanted to, but it wasn’t his only tool; this was a business proposel; this they understood. Information began flooding their terminals – heads bent to receive it, but all eyes sprang back at once as he rose, and began pacing the long room, speaking quietly.
“Every one of you here today is a person of intelligence; you wouldn’t have got to where you are without it. I don’t need to explain the state of the world to you, because the study of the world is your business. None of you are blind, none of you are prone to madness; you know what we see on our news, and probably just a little bit more – but I know it all, and that is all I have brought with me tonight.”
After the awe that had settled on the room, his open candour seemed like a breath of fresh air, cutting through all the webs of worry they had strung about themselves. They would not trust him, not yet: they were too canny for that, too experienced, but at least they were willing to listen. Play it wrong, Gabriel thought, push them too far, and we’ll see how many gunmen they brought tonight. He could spot the reserved ones and the disbelieving ones, see the anger on some faces, and still fear on others. He had been living for this moment for years, and now was the time to see whether he could live up to it.
“Gentlemen.” A flourish of the cane. “Gentlemen, I would not come to you were things any less desperate, but the time for careful planning is long past. Between you, you own the production of three quarters of the world, and yet you are reduced to grabbing at handouts, fighting rearguard actions to keep your companies alive. Always you are successful, always you make huge profits, but somehow there is always that danger of closure. How? How can two such things go together? You all know the answers.
“There are no places left to hide, now, for your capitalism and your conglomerate. You have become too much, and now there are people out to get a piece of you, and they can. Great men have always bred envy, but this time the horse-thieves are the ones making the laws. You have no allies left to turn to; the days of big business are almost over. Your governments will take your money, and what will you have then?”

There was a palpable silence. Gabriel opened his mouth to continue, but was forestalled by sardonic clapping near the far end of the table. He knew without looking who it would be; he had a list of possible stumbling blocks in his mind, and this man was one of the largest.
“Bravo, Mr. Smith, or whatever the hell your name really is. Not that I especially give a damn.” Jackson Packer was heavy on his feet, the typical fleshy American, and letting his formidable Southern drawl weave its own kind of blunt magic. “You’ve spun your speech out, and even kept it brief, which is very impressive given what I’ve seen of your kind. And I’ve seen plenty, Smith, I’ve seen them in every pathetic form known to man. Believe me, Smith, there’s nothing more abject than a man who tells you he won’t beg, and spend the evening asking your for money – that is what you want, isn’t it Smith? That is all you’ve come here for: why not just ask and be done? Save me the trouble of sitting on my old laurels for too long.”
Whispers were running swiftly about, hissing some backbone into frightened men, but James allowed himself a smile into Packer’s heavily lidded eyes; the man was a force, yes, but he was a force like a hurricane. Fearsome, but unpredictable and changeable.
“You’ve been playing golf on your vistas too long, Mr. Packer,” he rejoined, and saw the others’ eyes glint dangerously. “You have let the world pass you by in revolutions and downward spirals, and thought that things would always be the way they were. I’m here to show you what you’ve missed, Packer.”
The older man’s mouth twisted, as if at a bad taste. “Oh, continue, by all means,” he said scathingly, sitting down slowly and carefully. “But don’t go on for too long: I want to be out of the city in time for my golf match tomorrow morning.”
Gabriel acknowledged the barb with a smile, and gestured upwards sharply. Amidst a flurry of startled movements and stifled obscenities, the entire western wall of the room came alive, flooding the room with light from the huge three-dimensional map displayed there.

“Gentlemen,” said James Gabriel, the man called Smith. “Gentlemen, I will tell you a story.”

At first it was hard for me to stay interested due to the long description of the hustle and bustle of the meeting. But, I'm glad that I kept reading because I have a few Ideas of what this James Gabriel is up to. This is an intriguing story but, the thing is I just can't put my finger on what gets me so interested in your character. Maybe because he is out for power or maybe it is the mysterious personality that creates suspense.(I love suspense by the way.) Maybe he is an alien in disguise or just a bad guy out to rule the world. Or maybe he is one of those heroes that doesn't call himself a hero nor does he make it apparent. I might be over analyzing your story but it dose leave me asking questions and I like that.

2.
“You understand what is happening to you, but you do not yet understand the ‘why’ of it. There are deeper things going on beneath the surface of the world than you hear about in your metal towers, and I have no heard a good report in months. It is my business to know what I am about to tell you, and it will be your business no to repeat even a word of it.
“Power has shifted, slowly but surely. The old superpowers are waning quickly now, and the signs are beginning to tell. America is powerful, yes, but in her heart she has become a soft nation, and it relies too much on money and prestige to keep her out of trouble. One day, the barbarians will turn up at her gates, and we will have another Rome on our hands. In Europe there is no power left: it is an old place, now, with too many old people, sitting under trees in France and Italy and talking about the weather. It is a comfortable way to live, but they cannot stop the approaching storm: they can only talk.
“Together, those allies are still powerful, but there are greater empires rising: in the far east, the Indo-Chinese Territories control most of the natural resources left on the planet, and there are twice as many people in China alone as in the whole of the western world. Can you imagine twenty, thirty, a hundred million soldiers burning their way down the Steppes to Europe? Such a number is only a token of what they could raise had they the need.
“It is a delicate situation, though not impossible to contain. But that is not the end of this story: the darkest chapters are only now being written.”

The lights in the conference room had slowly bled into a dull near-black; Gabriel’s slight figure was outlined starkly against the faded map, and his dull eyes seemed to burn in their deep-set sockets. Row after row of fearful faces gazed at him, only Packer’s expression betraying nothing of his thoughts. With a slight gesture, Gabriel set the screen moving again: the world slowly shifted and expanded, bringing the former Iranian city of Tehran into the view. Picture, faces of hard looking men in headscarves or with rifles slung across their backs began spilling out of the edges of the picture, filling it up with ranks of men who were all too well known.
“Tonight, the most powerful men from across the Islamic world are meeting in the Houses of Glory to discuss something that has only ever been laughed at: unification. The Kasredin al-Hadijj is ready to lead them as Caliph: with oil and fanatics to burn, the Muslim states will finally be a force to be reckoned with. Three coalitions, one of them underpopulated, two of them hugely overcrowded: do I need to tell you any more?”

The silence stretched on and on; Gabriel made no move. Slowly, one of the men part way down the table stirred himself, and tried to speak calmly.
"But surely, they won't attempt an attack: if they did, it would only force an alliance between the other two powers. No-one can risk being left with only a third of the world, while someone else controls the rest. It simply couldn't come to that."
Gabriel smiled, coldly, and the man shrank back in his seat. With a flick of his wrist, one of the faces on the screen slowly enlarged, until there could be no mistaking it. The man who had just spoken put his face in his hands; to the side of him, Packer inhaled sharply.
"He was photographed arriving very early, and very secretly; if there had not been a man at every vantage point around the building, he would never have been seen. Officially, the Chinese government places him somewhere in Nepal, enjoying a relaxing holiday: somehow, I doubt their premier ambassador has arrived in the middle east without their knowing."
The small man had raised his face again, a mask of uncertainty. "Surely," he said, with difficulty, "surely the Territories cannot be that foolish. Can they truly believe that the Caliphate will stop at annihilating the west? Their goal has been a world united under the Crescent banner, it has always been that! Not all the millions they sacrifice will hold back al-Hadijj once he has Europe and America under his thumb."
But even as he was finishing, Packer was shaking his head, slowly and painfully He got up, and walked slowly toward the map, as if needing to be sure of himself.
"The Emperor is not a fool," he said, almost to himself. "He will not let himself be overwhelmed." The gigantic face of the diplomat stared angrily down at him, as if daring him to decipher more. "al-Hadijj will have to take Europe before he can attack America. The U.S. government will be forced to act; it cannot afford to let the its allies be taken, it does not have enough of them for that. With so many men mobilised abroad, she would be the perfect for an invasion." His eyes roamed the map, falling on the far eastern coast. "She will strike from Japan, and across the Bering Straits. The Russians will be tied up; they won't pose any resistance." There was something akin to admiration in his eyes. "With the U.S. taken, the South American states will fall easily; the European and Caliphate armies may even keep each other busy for long enough that China can take Africa and Australia. It is a master stoke - the west would be taken, and the Middle Eastern countries would be surrounded. They will double-cross everyone." He shivered, and turned slowly back to his seat.

All his life, he thought, he had been the one to mete out pain. Justly, perhaps, but he wished that just once, he could set aside the truth for a moment. He had never been able to make people feel better; he was not about to start now. He laughed at himself, inwardly, and pushed the knife in further.
"Do you think it ends there?" He couldn't look at the slumped figure off to the side; Packer already knew what was coming. He had been wrong, James thought: the old man had been the most intelligent of them all.
"Do you think it ends there," he repeated, loudly into the still room. "Do you think that the United States of American, proud and free above all things, will submit to the rule of a Chinese Emperor? Or a Muslim Caliph? Of course not. I can hear them in the War Room now, trying to make their choices seem human, trying to justify what they're about to do. Peace of mind will never come easy to these men again.
"America still has the biggest nuclear stockpile in the world: ancient bombs from just after World War Two; Mark Twos' from the first invasion of Iran; huge atomic behemoths they've barely finished researching. You know what will happen: if they can't be free, then no-one can. They'll wipe out every living thing from Tokyo to Kiev; Hiroshima all over again, but it won't burn alone. China, India, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel - fire and desert; a decomposing hell on earth."
"But America will survive." Everyone turned toward the source of the deep Texan accent, a tall bony man near the end. "Why should we care if the damn Chinks burn, they're the ones who are attacking us! Once we've destroyed their country, we can drive 'em into the sea, rid the world of them once and for all!"
Packer spat disgustedly onto the floor, but there were some nodding heads among the frightened faces. Gabriel slammed his cane down on the ground, eyes afire with anger.
"I thought I'd never hear a thing like that said out loud," he said, barely less than a snarl. "To sacrifice half the world for the sake of your own country, more than nine-tenths of the population. That's despicable. And you still don't understand."
The angular man sat back, but his face had lost none of its defiance. James sent the map spinning once more, brining up the Pacific Ocean.
"Two weeks ago, just after the Iranian ambassador left Beijing, a convoy of ships disappeared without a trace. Full contact one minute, absolute radio silence the next; twenty full-sized McKendrick class merchant transporters, with enough escort to level the cliffs of Dover to dust." He paused for emphasis. "They were carrying fifty year old Uranium based ISBMs from Russia to the U.S.A." He looked up, making sure the full force of his words were taking effect. "Only one power has the naval power to take on a fleet of that size."
"China," breathed Packer, darkly.
Gabriel nodded. "America, Europe, Africa: they will not escape unscathed. If it comes to this, then this is it: this is the end."

The shadows lengthened in the room, while every man sat lost in his own dark thoughts. Gabriel stood like a statue, watching the future being turned over slowly in so many minds. Finally, Packer's old grey eyes met his dampened blue ones.
"I know you, spy, and I know your kind. You stalk about at the edge of things, listening in on whispers, selling your knowledge to anyone who can pay you." His face twisted. "I would hate to think that the fate of the world lay in the hands of one such as you. But I have nothing else to think."
He paused, rubbing his hand absent-mindedly across his lined forehead. "The days are darkening, Gabriel," he said, so low that only James could hear him. "Everything goes black around me; the people take my hands, and lead me where I do not want to go. I can only fight fire with fire, night with night." Their eyes met again, and there was fear mixed with steel, and tempered with determination and understanding. "You are the darkest one of all, Gabriel; pray God your good intentions do not lead us straight to hell."
He forced himself erect, and raised his voice.
"You will have your money."