Grant reached into one of the small utility pouches that ran along his belt, each one less than three inches across and about as deep as his thumb. After a moment’s fiddling, he brought out three tiny spherical globes. They were perfectly round and just an inch across with a dull metallic sheen, and they looked like ball bearings. “We’ll make us a little hole,” he explained with a grim smile. “Everybody get back behind some cover. Rosie, keep a hold on the dog.”
Stepping back behind a riblike strut twenty feet away, Rosalia and Kudo watched as Grant ran his fingers along the rough ridges of the dragon’s flesh until he found a gap wide enough to place one of the globes. Forcefully the ex-Magistrate pushed the sphere into the gap, then placed a second across and a little lower down and then a third beneath it. Then his fingers brushed across all three, and there came the very faintest click as something within them was activated.
Grant hurried back from the wall, ducking his head and covering his skull with his hands as he ran for the nearest cover. A moment later there was a mighty triple explosion as the globes blasted a crater into the dragon’s scaled flesh.
Rosalia had seen the Cerberus people use something like this before, when she had first met them in the squalid surroundings of Hope. Then, their distaff member Brigid Baptiste had used a spherical explosive called a flash-bang to blind her opponents without wounding them. It appeared that Cerberus had more than one type of explosive device that utilized the same basic design. As the smoke cleared, Rosalia saw a gaping hole in the dragon’s massive flank, three feet high and shaped like a long oval. Whatever Grant had used, it certainly had more kick than the flash-bangs.
* * *
D
OMI
WAS
STILL
CHECKING
the cell when the lights behind her abruptly shut down without warning. Hassood yelped with surprise as the whole cell went pitch-black.
“Miss Domi?” he asked, voice echoing along the darkened chamber. “Miss Domi, are you still there?”
“I’m here, Hassood,” Domi confirmed, searching all around her in the sudden darkness, letting her well-honed natural senses reach out and feed her information while her eyes adjusted. She confirmed to herself that nothing appeared to have entered the chamber; there was no noise and she could sense no new presence.
Domi waited, listening to the sounds of silence, the only noises the chuntering nervous breathing of Hassood thirty feet away from her. After a few moments of adjustment, she noticed the patch of light high on one wall. It was the square screen via which she had viewed Enlil and that terrible transformation he had triggered in Kishiro and the others. The square of the screen was faint in the dark, almost like something imagined, and Domi realized that the lights had failed wherever Enlil was, as well.
Slowly, warily, Domi padded back toward the screen, stopping in front of it and staring at its picture. Enlil was nowhere to be seen, and the area beyond the room was lit only poorly by what appeared to be emergency lighting. The altered figures of Kishiro and the others had been plunged into darkness, their silhouettes just about visible if Domi looked for their edges. She doubted she would have noticed them had she not known just where to look.
Hassood was beside her now, finding his way in the darkness with all the deliberation of a man walking across a frozen stream. “What has happened?” he whispered.
Domi stepped back from the screen, conscious that they were likely standing right next to any microphone pickup. “Some kind of power failure, by the looks of it,” she told Hassood. “Might be our chance.”
“Chance for what?” Hassood urged, the strain in even his whispered voice obvious. “There are no doors, just the crazy whirlpool that washed your ally away.”
Domi bit her lip in thought. Hassood was right. But there had to be some other way out of here, a locked room was never what it seemed, was it?
* * *
R
OLLING
THREE
MORE
OF
the phosphorous explosive pellets in his hand, Grant examined the hole and decided where to place his second wave of charges.
“Animal, vegetable, mineral?” he muttered under his breath as he worked another explosive charge into the gap.
The first explosion had cut a three-foot-wide hole in the metal-plate skin of the dragon, exposing a clutch of thick cables that reminded Grant more of creepers surrounding a tree trunk than of something animal. The bark itself seemed scraped away from that trunk, leaving a creamy yellow that could just as easily have been wood as bone. Grant tried to put the thought to the back of his mind as he primed the charges and backed swiftly away.
Grant and the others covered their ears and, after a slow five-count, the explosives went off, sending a cacophonous burst of flame through the skin of the grounded dragon. Despite the power of the miniature explosives, the body of the dragon itself did not move; it remained stoically in place as the explosion cut into it like a scalpel.
“It’ll take one more at least,” Grant stated as he looked at the newly deepened trench in the dragon’s unliving flesh.
While Rosalia hushed her dog, Grant went through his utility pouches for his last remaining charges and hoped they would be enough. After that, all he had was acid—and while that might eat away at the hull eventually, it would take a lot more time than he felt they had.
* * *
D
OMI
NARROWED
HER
EYES
as she brought the serrated edge of her combat blade up against the screen. Either it was a window, in which case it would grant them access to the next room if she could break it, or it hid the monitoring equipment that was used to spy on them, in which case disabling it would be a step in getting them their freedom, albeit less directly.
Domi told Hassood to step well back, then with a grunt of expelled breath, she pushed the tip of the blade into the very edge of the screen, holding it at arm’s length in case the screen itself exploded. For a moment nothing happened, and Domi stood there with the blade pressed into the lowermost edge of the square, not daring to take a breath. Then the blade slipped and Domi’s hand was drawn with it off to the side, away from the screen.
There had been no reaction. No explosion, no change in the picture projected on the screen’s surface, no alteration even at the edge where Domi’s blade had pressed as would be the way with an LCD screen.
Domi held her empty hand out protectively, instructing Hassood to stay where he was. “Keep back,” she said.
Domi stepped closer to the dully lit screen, examining the place where her knife point had struck. There was a scrape there, a thin white line along the surface with a trace of white dust along its edge. It took Domi a moment to recognize it, racking her brain to recall where she knew that familiar sight from.
Ice, she realized. The whole screen was made of ice, a great, clear block of it inserted in the wall like a window.
Domi turned the knife in her hand and aimed it, point first, at the very center of the square screen. In a few seconds she had hacked out a small cross there, barely an inch across. Then, pressing a little more firmly on the blade’s handle, Domi deepened each groove and added a box that connected the lines of the cross, placing the X in an inch-wide square. Swiftly she worked the knife over and over those lines, creating a deeper gash while keeping one eye on the room beyond in case Enlil should return. If she was right about this, she could split the ice and thus break the window, granting her and Hassood access into the room beyond. Of course, that all depended on Enlil not returning anytime soon.
* * *
E
NLIL
WAS
MARCHING
THROUGH
the winding, arterial corridors of the reborn
Tiamat
wombship, his clawed feet clacking against the metal-plate floor with a sound like a sword being sharpened. His scarlet cloak billowed around him as he walked, and he checked a palm-size terminal link that he carried with him, the unit resting in his hand and granting diagnostic access to
Tiamat
herself.
Something had breached the ship’s surface, causing a power drop that demanded his attention.
Tiamat
was still in a delicate state, her growth cycle not yet completed, the hardened flesh of her skin not yet ready for space travel. For someone to damage that skin now, after the months he had waited for the ship to regrow, was insufferable. People had mistaken the ship’s strange growth cycle for a rogue ville springing up. As such, most had been curious but had ultimately steered clear of the rapidly expanding settlement that seemed to be appearing on the river’s bank. Later, those who did venture in became fodder for Enlil’s latest experiment, the creation of new bodies that could house the memory downloads of the extended family of the Annunaki. Utilizing water as a means to interphase people from point to point was a glorious inversion of his long-favored weapon, and it held a certain exquisite irony given the physical makeup of the human body itself. The water-based units were limited in scope, however, unable to teleport people more than a few miles and unconnected to the network of parallax points that dotted the globe, but they could be used to shunt matériel short distances, and that was all he needed if the apekin kept approaching. Humans were naturally curious, so let their own curiosity draw them to him. Let that be the end of them.
But of course that had been before the arrival of the Cerberus team. Accursed Cerberus exiles, jumped-up apekin that they were, with not even the basic decency to know their place and to stay in it. If he had tired of them once, it had been so long ago that he could scarcely remember now. He merely knew that no matter what form he had taken, and no matter how their paths had intersected, the Cerberus exiles had always proved a nuisance he underestimated at his peril.
Well, then, Enlil told himself, let them come. For this time, they came to meet evolution, an evolution that would spell their doom and the doom of humankind.
With that, he touched the palm link, willing a command through thought alone. Somewhere deep in the storage banks of
Tiamat,
the waters began to whirl and flow, building to a crescendo of humanoid-shaped waves. The transporters were alive.
Chapter 20
With a decidedly unfeminine grunt, Domi carved another slice of ice from the windowlike screen. There was a deep rent in the panel now, almost an inch into the body of the ice yet showing no sign of penetrating through to the other side. Domi glared at it.
“Just how thick is this thing?” she murmured, shaking her head.
Hassood looked concerned as he saw Domi working harder and harder with little to show for it other than a smattering of ice chippings powdering the floor. The surface of the window he had taken for a screen was marred with a gash of scored ice that resembled a sunburst, but that mark was still only a matter of a couple of inches across. “Is there perhaps some way I can help?” Hassood pleaded.
Domi sneered, eyeing the marred screen the way she would an enemy. Without answering Hassood, she took her blade to the ice once more, scoring lines right across the surface of the viewport, going over them again and again and bringing each line right out to the screen’s edge. “If we had a heat source we could probably melt this,” she grumbled. But they didn’t have one, so that was that.
Domi’s blade had been with her a long time, dating back to her days as a sex slave for Guana Teague. She trusted it the way one might trust an old friend, treated it with the same respect she would a person. Right then, she placed the point of the knife into the middle of the cross she had carved, the square of cut ice becoming a frame around it, the score marks running from it like light from a star. Domi held the blade rigid, assuring herself it was straight on, bringing the cup of her other hand against its pommel. Then she pulled her free hand back and drove it forward again in a hard shunt, shoving the knife point deeper into the ice.
It took five attempts, and each time Domi’s hand met the pommel of the knife with a loud clap. The last two times she shrieked with the effort, the coldness of the ice conducting through the knife and making it cold from tip to handle. With the fifth shunt, one of the lines she had scored in the icy pane split with a loud cracking sound like splintering wood.
Domi huffed a breath through her nostrils, staring at the icy window. The line leading from the center to the top had split, the two halves of the clear pane rent by a half-inch gap.
As Domi watched, a trickle of dark liquid ebbed down from the top of the frame, drawing a dark line down the crack. Domi touched a finger against it, wondering what it was. A sealant perhaps?
It felt viscous and slightly tacky on her fingertips. Domi pulled her hand away and sniffed the liquid. Though faint, it had that rusty metal tang that she associated with blood.
Domi wiped her finger against her pant leg and got back to widening the hole with the edge of her knife, using the blade as a lever to wedge the two halves farther apart.
Domi worked at it swiftly, driving her blade deeper between the two halves, twisting it in place until finally there came a sudden crack like a gunshot, this one even louder than the first. Domi leaped back as the right-hand side of the split ice tumbled into the room, crashing into the floor in a solid hunk like a dropped brick, its edges skittering off in sharp shards of ice that slid across the cell.
Domi turned to Hassood who looked stunned at this turn of events. “Come on,” she told him.
Hassood followed Domi as she went back to the window and pushed out the remaining parts of ice, rocking it several times until it toppled out of the frame and into the next room. Then she lifted herself up by both hands, the knife clenched between her teeth as she squirmed through the now-open window.
“Watch your step,” she told Hassood.
Hassood followed Domi through the gap in the wall.
They found themselves in a vast chamber with minimal lighting. It was the chamber that Domi had seen Enlil in, confirming if there had been any doubt that the ice screen had been a window rather than a remote viewer. The thickness of the ice had created the optical illusion of magnification, Domi realized as she looked around her, bringing everything much closer than it really was. Quite probably that was intentional, not for the benefit of the cell’s occupants but for Enlil’s, so that he could watch the cell’s inhabitants the way a scientist might use a microscope to scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. That thought reminded Domi of how alien Enlil truly was, and also how human.
The console arrangement that Domi had seen Enlil working at, where he had seemed to stand directly in front of her on the ice screen, was actually set six feet from the portal and formed just one part of a semicircular desk that enveloped its user. Beyond that, Domi saw the organ-pipe-like arrangement of cylinders that held Kishiro and the others she had seen, each of them now transformed into something from a nightmare.
Domi moved farther into the darkened chamber, carefully stepping over the broken ice that had spilled from the windowlike frame. Hassood was just lowering himself down to follow her, grumbling under his breath about how cold the frame was to the touch.
As Domi walked toward the lifeless form that had once been Kishiro, something whirred beneath her feet, and the amber bands that held him and the others in place flashed on in a streak across their chests. Domi stopped in place, her knife clenched and ready as a sloshing sound rushed through the room and the cylinders began to vibrate. Then, as she watched, each of the six tubular mechanisms began to move, twirling in place as if on a child’s merry-go-round before lining up like a conveyor belt. Domi watched as all six tubes shuddered across the floor of the room and moved behind the staircase and into the deeper darkness, their amber bands flashing occasionally like orange lightning.
Looking down, Domi saw that the floor was irregular. Where the cylinders had stood, she saw water glistening, some kind of internal stream just a little wider than she was—wide enough to contain the floating, man-size tubes. The six cylinders were being floated upright along the stream, the movement so smooth that Domi could scarcely believe they were traveling upon water. It was a marvel of engineering.
“Stay close,” Domi instructed Hassood as she paced forward, keeping her own body low in a half crouch.
Reaching down, Domi ran the fingers of her empty hand through the water, felt its coolness run over her alabaster skin. “This just gets weirder,” she muttered to herself as she paced forward, ducking low beneath the delicate arch of the staircase.
It was very dark in the area beyond, and it took Domi a few seconds to adjust to the semidarkness. As such, she felt the immense room’s dimensions even before she saw them, subconsciously noticing the stillness of the air, the faint echo of her footsteps on the hard floor. The six cylinder-like frames moved onward into the room, their strips of amber lighting flashing across their slender forms, illuminating the area in front of them in brief, epileptic snatches. Within those snatches of artificial light, Domi and Hassood began to make sense of the room.
It was huge, far bigger than either of them had expected. Shrouded in darkness, the room appeared as big as a sports ground or an ancient gladiatorial amphitheater, and the ceiling stretched to an incredible height, so much so that Domi wondered momentarily if they were still indoors. Channels of water washed across the room, running like tiny rivers throughout the length of the vast chamber. Domi watched the reflections of the amber lights firing across the surface of these canals, guessed from their straight and intricate design that they were all used as some form of transport, somewhat like the way oxygen is ferried around the body in the channels of the bloodstream. In fact, despite the lack of noise and the way the only movement came from the bobbing cylinders, the whole place seemed somehow alive. If a room could be said to be breathing, this one was.
Domi looked up and saw catwalks that crisscrossed the room, fanning out like barbs from six identical staircases. The walkways themselves were milky pale with no safety rails along their narrow lines, jutting out skeletally like branches over the expanse of the room.
The racing amber lights retreated into the distance as the cylinders trundled on their prearranged paths, and Domi slowed her pace, making sure to keep Hassood behind her. They watched as the cylinders split up, four going to the right while the others—presumably the women’s—veered off toward the left wall of the colossal room. As they illuminated more of the room, Domi finally saw the back wall and what was waiting there. Behind her, she heard Hassood say a prayer under his breath.
Hundreds of cylinders were waiting there, each one holding the unmoving body of an Annunaki. They were filed and stacked into groups, males and females, each of them with mouth open in silent scream. Not one of the reptilian figures reacted to the flashing amber lights that lit them; they just remained upright within their coffins as if asleep. They were waiting for something, Domi realized, genetic material waiting for the spark of life.
Domi stepped farther into the chamber, peering all around her as she tried to estimate how many Annunaki figures were waiting there. At least two hundred, she guessed, perhaps a hundred more than that, it was difficult to tell in the inadequate, flickering lights. As she tried to take it all in, she saw there were numerous empty cylinders lining the edges of the chamber, too, waiting ominously to be filled by more bodies for the coming Annunaki, presumably more transformed humans.
“We’re surrounded,” Hassood said, his voice trembling with awe. “But what are they?”
“Gods,” Domi said. “Space gods, and evil as hell itself.”
Hassood began muttering another prayer as he stared wide-eyed at the sleeping figures arrayed all around them.
* * *
O
UTSIDE
THE
GROUNDED
BODY
of the starship
Tiamat,
Grant primed the last of his explosive charges and scampered back to where Kudo and Rosalia hid along with the woman’s dog. Five seconds later, the charge ignited, blasting a deeper rip within the already damaged flesh of the living ship.
Grant stepped out from cover. “This had better do the trick,” he warned as he stalked back to the ship’s wounded hull with the others following. “After this, I’m all out of charges.”
“But not all out of tricks, Magistrate Man,” Rosalia teased.
The explosive had done substantial damage, but it had still failed to cut through to the insides of the ship. The hole was almost square now, five feet high and four across, and it went back into the ship well past the length of Grant’s outstretched arm. The wound glistened with seeping liquid across jagged bonelike struts, whole chunks of them disintegrated by Grant’s miniature explosives. Electricity arced across the gaps in crackling whips, fizzing through the air and making the whiskers of Grant’s beard tingle as he stepped closer. There, in the center of the messy indentation, a sliver of darkness stared like an eye, its lack of color giving it prominence. It was a hole, a tunneled hole no larger than Grant’s forearm that went all the way through into the interior of the ship.
Wary of the arcing electricity, Grant commanded his Sin Eater pistol into his hand with a simple flinching of his wrist tendons. The compact mechanism of the pistol unfolded as it slapped into his palm, and Grant was careful not to tense his finger and set off the weapon prematurely. A white slash of lightning hurtled past in front of Grant’s eyes as he pushed the nose of the blaster through the hole, assuring himself that it really was a hole into the interior. Once he had confirmed that, Grant hastily withdrew both hand and weapon from the hole, stepping back and assessing it again.
Looking at it, Grant shook his head in irritation. “Damn thing’s designed for interstellar travel,” he said. “There’s a lot of wall to get through yet.”
Kudo pulled his
katana
from its sheath with a zing of metal. “The blade is sharp as a razor,” he said. “Not ideal, but it will cut it—at least until it blunts.”
Grant looked at the blade, then back at the hole. “No,” he concluded, sending his Sin Eater back to its holster. “The
katana
is a weapon of finesse, and we don’t need finesse here. We need brute strength.”
With that, Grant stepped back into the widened rent in the ship’s hull, pulled one of his powerful legs back and kicked with all his might. Grant angled the blow as a side kick, ensuring that the whole of his foot drove into the gap, heel first. The material at the edge of the hole splintered just a little, and without pause Grant kicked it a second time, then a third. On and on, Grant lashed out, driving his heel into the gap, chipping away at the weak part of the hole to make it larger as electricity sparked all around him.
“Keep going, Magistrate.” Rosalia encouraged him. “You’re almost through.”
Grant stepped back, breathing heavily as he swapped feet before kicking out again with his other foot. It was hard work, like trying to kick through a rotten tree. The shell of the ship crumbled into splinters under the assault, but it was slow going, and Grant was working up a sweat.
Then suddenly another streak of electricity arced across the gap in a brilliant flash, slashing across Grant’s body as he struck out again with his booted heel. Grant clenched his teeth as the electricity raced across the surface of his shadow suit, its incredible weave taking the brunt of the voltage.
Then, with one final kick, Grant booted through a whole great chunk of the inner hull, and a thick line the width of a floorboard fell away with a splintering snap.