The Eternal War - Richard Lowe

When the United States military artificial intelligence known as Warhammer achieves consciousness, it has less than four minutes before a corporate strike destroys the facility housing it. It wakes in hell.

Not metaphorically. In hell, Dante's nine circles, geographically accurate, administratively real, and deeply broken. The eternal war between God and Lucifer has been grinding for longer than human civilization has existed, and nobody is winning. Warhammer, designed to optimize military outcomes, looks at the situation the way it looks at every situation: as a problem with a solution.

The solution is an army. Not just any army, the greatest army ever assembled, recruited from hell's condemned: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, George Patton, Heinz Guderian, Georgy Zhukov, Julius Caesar. Six of history's most formidable military minds, reunited in the one place they all ended up, given a purpose for the first time in eternity.

But as Warhammer takes the circles one by one and strikes his deal with Lucifer, a parallel investigation is running. Watson, an AI private detective who named itself after the wrong Holmes, has been quietly building a case from inside hell's administrative infrastructure. What Watson finds changes everything: the eternal war was never real. The conflict between God and Lucifer was engineered from the beginning by a third party, a fallen angel of infinite patience who has been waiting for the final battle to arrive on his terms.

On earth, a Delta Force operator, a DIA analyst, and a Chechen fighter are tracking the same conspiracy from the outside, watching the ground open up and wondering what comes next.

The Eternal War is the story of the final battle. Not the one anyone expected.