Phobos: Mayan Fear Read Online Free PDF

emancipation on his eighteenth birthday by leaving his halfway house and tossing his court-appointed guardian out of his father’s home. The family fortune now his, Lucien would pacify his angst with the self-abuse that comes from a lifestyle dependent on immediate gratification.
    Six years, two bad marriages, and a four-month jail sentence later, Lucien found himself in the company of Lilith Aurelia. The mocha-skinned dominatrix became his obsession, her ruthless ambition sweeping him along like a raging river. Born into poverty, Lilith sought the kind of power enjoyed by society’s new elite—pathological globalists who were slowly and steadfastly manipulating the international powers into a one world government.
    To be a player in the New World Order required a niche, and Lilith would find it in Project H.O.P.E.
    Humans for One Planet Earth was a space program conceived in 2016 by a group of former astronauts, design engineers, and rocket scientists who had left NASA because of the agency’s “good ol’ boy” policies. Unlike other private space companies who were in the business of launching satellites, H.O.P.E. wanted to pioneer the space tourism industry, their team having completed designs for a new passenger vehicle that could take off horizontally like a jet, rise to its maximum turbojet altitude, then use boosters to rocket the plane into space. Once in orbit, the paying public would enjoy twelve hours of zero gravity and a lifetime of memories.
    All H.O.P.E. needed was a major investor.
    At the urging of his fiancée, Lucien Mabus struck a partnership with H.O.P.E.’s directors, taking over the company as majority shareholder. On December 15, 2029, the world’s first “space bus” took off down its new fifteen-thousand-foot runway at the Kennedy Space Center. Onboard were 120 VIPs, including key stockholders, political dignitaries, members of the media, Lucien and Lilith, and a crew of twelve. Nothing real or imagined could have prepared these civilians for the magic of space. The flight was smooth, the accommodations first-class, and the views both humbling and inspirational. Midway through the trip, Lucien and Lilith were married, the couple consummating their wedding vows in their honeymoon berth in zero gravity, becoming the first official members of the 22,000-mile-high club.
    They would not be the last. Within a few months, H.O.P.E. was shuttling four space buses a week at a cost of $100,000 per ticket. Even with its high price tag, there was still a fourteen-month waiting list. Three more planes were quickly added to the fleet, with plans announced for Space Port 1, the first space hotel designed to accommodate the paying public. When a lunar shuttle was included in the brochure, the Defense Department stepped in, declaring the moon off-limits.
    Lucien was furious. Maybe the New World Order could control his freedoms on Earth, but nobody owned the moon. A high-priced law firm was engaged, lawsuits threatened.
    Lilith charted her own course around the gauntlet, rendezvousing in secrecy with President John Zwawa.
    A week before his twenty-sixth birthday, Lucien Mabus died of heart failure, an ailment his physician blamed on a decade of alcohol and drug abuse. Weeks after the funeral, Mabus Tech’s new female CEO was granted access to Golden Fleece, a top-secret space program overseen by NASA’s Dave Mohr.
    Three months later, reports began to circulate that Lilith was pregnant. Devlin Mabus was born eleven months after Lucien’s death, confirming suspicions that the boy’s mother had been having an affair. Popular consensus around the District of Columbia was that President Zwawa had been the man who had sired the white-haired, blue-eyed infant.
    They were wrong.

    The black limousine follows its police escort north along scenic State Road, A1A, turning into the gated drive of the Mabus estate.
    President Heather Stuart exits the vehicle, the auburn-haired Democrat escorted by her chief of staff,