Thomersen crashed to the ground with a woof of expelled breath, cursing as the meat cleaver slipped from his sweaty hand. He reached for it automatically, only to feel something crash down on his back, knocking him jaw-first back to the ground. It was the Annunaki, running across his back as he reached for the vicious implement. The next thing Thomersen saw was that wicked blade flashing through the air toward him as the lizard-man plucked it from the ground, striking so swiftly that he almost didn’t feel it at all. Thomersen’s face began to burn a moment later as the nerves sang with pain, and the vision in his left eye turned red with blood. What happened after that was mercifully swift as the Annunaki finished the kill.
As Thomersen slumped to the ground, his hacked-up body twitching as his lifeblood spilled across the cobbled bones, the orange-scaled Annunaki turned, swiping at the next closest human with the cleaver he now wielded, lopping a great hunk of flesh from the woman’s hip. The woman cried out as the material of her pants was shredded, the bloody gouge cutting through to the bone. The Annunaki grabbed her by her outstretched arm as she tried to run, hefting her from her feet and driving the bloody wedge of the meat cleaver into her torso. The woman shrieked, while others of her number came hurrying over to help or struggled with the other Annunaki warriors. The meat cleaver swept down in the Annunaki’s clawed hand, driving into the woman’s skull thrice before he turned his attention to his next foe.
This same bloody scene was played out again and again in various ways across the vastness of the city like the repeating chorus of some terrible death song, as the one hundred met three thousand. The skirmishes were tiny and brutal, taking place in alleyways and beneath grand hoardings that grew from the buildings like fingernails. On the outskirts of the dragon ship, the quantum gateway held in place, disgorging more and more warriors for Ullikummis, each man, woman and child armed with faith. The towering pillars of rock that Ullikummis had drawn from the earth helped guide them, directing them like a funnel into the battlefield. Ullikummis himself was somewhere amid the bone structures, striding purposefully into enemy territory with Brigid and the yet-born Ninlil at his side.
In some instances, the Annunaki found themselves facing those most loyal to Ullikummis, the so-called firewalkers who had submitted to the intrusive addition of the sentient stone into their bodies. These warriors were stronger, able to meditate and call upon the endurance of their master to better deflect blows, their flesh becoming like unto a thing of stone. They too fell, though they took many of the reborn Annunaki with them.
One group of firewalkers pinned an Annunaki with emerald-scaled skin within the tiny courtyard between low buildings, taking the higher ground and firing sharp stone flecks from the slingshots that they carried until the creature finally tumbled to his knees. Then they swarmed down upon their fallen foe, ripping into him with stony kicks and punches with all the force of an avalanche, pounding his body into pulp. The Annunaki lost consciousness at some point during the attack, but the crowd continued on, hating the others and all they represented.
Sela Stone was among the early waves of humans who rushed into the city to face the Annunaki, and the scene of carnage all around her reminded her of the horror she had witnessed at the Cerberus redoubt. There it had been Ullikummis’s troops who had attacked her people, yet now she fought for them, her old identity of Sela Sinclair like a dream she had awoken from. Highly trained in the ways of combat from her days in the U.S. Navy, Sela used a pistol to blast not the Annunaki, whose skins were superhard, but to detonate explosive charges she tossed at them. It was a lot like skeet shooting, tossing those charges and blasting them while they were still in the air. She watched as the charges detonated, pouring fire over the relentless Annunaki warriors as they hurried down another of the alleylike streets. Though imperfect, her plan managed to down four Annunaki, two of them with one hit. She continued using it to push the line forward, getting herself and the human troops farther into the starship city.
Davies, meanwhile, had to have blacked out, and he awoke lying on the ground, shaking his head to try to clear it as the screams and sounds of violence echoed from the unadorned walls all around him. The bulk of the battle had moved farther into the city, little pockets of skirmishes occurring at almost every turn. There was blood on his lip, and he could taste it—acrid like iron—swilling between his front teeth. He pulled himself up, peering around as the world swam dizzily back into view. There were humans lying all about him, their limbs crushed or hacked off, their bodies stretched out at awkward angles.
Davies pulled himself warily to his feet, searching for possible threats. He guessed that he had survived because he looked dead, in some ironic twist of fate that he could not really put into words. Screams and shouts echoed from somewhere nearby, and the sudden cry of “Hold the line!” went out over the low buildings from behind him, though he could not pinpoint it. Then, up ahead, Davies saw five of the Annunaki troopers stomping along the narrow passageway in his direction, their lizard faces set in mean scowls.
Davies searched for a weapon that might have been discarded by one of his colleagues. His own length of door frame had disappeared amid the carnage, but there was a knife lying by a line of steps, and he hurried to snap it up. Streaked with blood, the knife was long and wide, shaped like a machete. Davies looked back up the claustrophobic street as the Annunaki marched toward him. He was outnumbered, and the knife in his hand looked decidedly small when compared to the muscular, naked bodies of the Annunaki.
Davies turned as he heard a noise from behind him—more footsteps, these heavy, the sound of them dominating the audio landscape for a moment. It was Ullikummis, rounding the corner. Davies felt himself tremble. Oh, to be in the presence of his god, a figure he had never actually seen before. Ullikummis was huge, taller than Davies had imagined, and his dark, rocky body was cut through with lines of lava that glowed intensely. He was magnificent. Behind him came his peculiar entourage—the beautiful redhead and the little girl with the feathery white-blond hair.
Ullikummis strode forth, taking in the quintet of Annunaki in a single dismissive glance. His hand flicked forward with disarming casualness and the ground beneath them rumbled. As the Annunaki ran at this, their most hated enemy, the cobbled pathway was rent apart, broad spikes of rock tearing through the surface and snagging the two lead Annunaki before they could step aside. The sharp lines of rock pierced their bodies and, immolated, they squirmed on them as Ullikummis strode past, never once slowing his pace. He had killed Annunaki in his youth, piercing their bodies with the stone knife Godkiller, a blade rent from the very fabric of his flesh. He thought nothing of killing them now, despite the tenacity of their superior bodies against common assault.
Ullikummis was upon the others in the group in an instant, batting the first of them aside with a sweep of his mighty arm. The creature’s jaw cracked as he tumbled away, skull broken with the force of that blow.
Ullikummis lunged, his huge hand snatching for a face. The Annunaki ducked, driving a jabbing punch at the mighty rock lord’s body. The blow slammed against Ullikummis with a sound like a toppling redwood, but he held his ground, pushed just two inches back on the flat, circular bases of his feet.
Davies watched in awe, blessed to see his idol in battle. He could not possibly guess the many hidden layers of this battle between Annunaki, even the pale imitations that the Igigi puppets were.
Then Ullikummis swept out again with one of his mighty arms, and the Annunaki trooper was flung backward, crashing into a wall with a shattering of bone. The one with the broken jaw was struggling back to his feet. Davies was about to cry out in warning, but Ullikummis was ahead of him, flicking his arm out to slam the outstretched fingers of his hand into the creature’s windpipe, felling him instantly.
The last of the enemy charged at Ullikummis, and he flicked his arm out once again, the fiery glow in his eyes pulsing brighter for a single second. With a rumble of quaking earth, another line of stone prongs sprang from the ground, bursting through the lumpy bone cobbles that lined the street until they stood like the needles on a porcupine’s back, each one seven feet in height. Davies shrieked as one of those sharp pointers drilled through his leg and up into his intestines, ripping out again at his breastbone in a gout of blood, his rib cage cracking open at the pressure. The Annunaki would-be attacker who had challenged Ullikummis hung in the air, another stone spike rammed through his body and up into his skull. He swung at a wicked angle, his own gore and brains sprayed across the stone, as Ullikummis marched onward, leading the way farther into the city of the dragon. Brigid Haight followed, with Little Quav in tow.
Davies died, staring into the dead eyes of the Annunaki as he swung like a washed sheet in the breeze.
* * *
T
HE
SOUNDS
OF
WAR
were long since behind him. Kudo could feel the exhaustion pulling at his muscles,
weighing him down. He had taken most of the twelve miles to the parallax point at a jog, carrying Domi’s slack body over first one shoulder then the other, alternating to try to stave off muscle fatigue. Prior to that, he had spent a day and night on mission, first flying to the drop zone as part of Grant’s field team and battling with several waves of guardians before he could finally enter the dragon. While inside the spaceship
Tiamat,
he had sustained dreadful injuries to his face when an acid-laced charge had struck him. And yet, despite all of that, Kudo continued on—he was a Tiger of Heaven, honoring his duty would always be of paramount import.
The parallax point lay within the ruins of an ancient temple that had stood close to the Euphrates for at least four thousand years. The temple was a sprawling, low single-story building with a basement beneath, constructed of sandy-colored rock that camouflaged it from casual view. From the air it seemed to form an almost perfect pentagonal shape covering fifty yards at its widest axis.
Up close the temple was pockmarked with bullet wounds, and the wall surfaces had been eroded by wind over the millennia since it had been built. Even so, it still looked impressive, one of the earliest signs of civilization on planet Earth.
Over the portable comm device he wore against his right ear, Kudo heard Donald Bry confirming that he was in the right place. “An agent will meet you momentarily,” Bry promised.
Kudo acknowledged Bry’s report before striding the final few paces to the nearest wall of the ancient building. It was perhaps a little unusual that Donald Bry chose not to say anything else, but Kudo was grateful for the man’s silence as he turned his concentration to the abandoned structure, searching for possible threats. He remained wary. Their enemies were all around, were they not? Parallax points were frequently hidden within special sites of religious interest, their uncanny power perhaps subconsciously influencing the humans around them. This temple was a typical location for one.
Hefting Domi over his left shoulder, Kudo paced between narrow walls, and his footsteps were appreciably silent despite the weight of the girl he carried. His eyes moved left and right as he searched for signs of habitation, listening to the desert winds scouring the walls. A figure moved up ahead, emerging from behind one of the sand-colored walls. Kudo felt relief when he recognized Brewster Philboyd.
“Mr. Kudo,” Brewster said, smiling broadly beneath his bespectacled brow, “I believe you ordered a ride home.”
Kudo nodded. “Philboyd, I am most gratified to see you. It has been one very long day.”
“Twenty-four hours,” Philboyd said agreeably as he led Kudo through the maze of open corridors to where he had set up the interphaser.
As they walked, Brewster inquired as to Domi’s health, and Kudo assured him she hadn’t stirred and that, as far as he could tell, nothing was broken.
The interphase unit waited on a wide stone tablet brushed with sand, its triangular sides glistening in the sunlight.
“How long were you waiting?” Kudo asked.
“Got here about twenty minutes ago,” Brewster said. “Took a little look around while I was waiting. Place is utterly dead, thank goodness. Don’t know what I’d have done if it hadn’t been.”
One of the fundamental problems with teleportation was that one could never quite be sure into which circumstances one would emerge. Since teleportation worked instantaneously, it required a sharp mind to react to whatever scenario one might face. As a rule, Brewster preferred to monitor things from the safety of his own desk.
“Still,” Brewster said as he tapped in the code to send them home, “at least we know where we’ll be jumping this time. Straight home and don’t spare the horses, am I right?”
Brewster pulled his hand back as the control panel at the base of the interphaser came to life, and the two men watched as the eerie cones of light opened above and below the metal pyramid like a lotus blossom, witchfire flashing within their churning depths. A moment later, Brewster and Kudo—with Domi’s unconscious form slung over the latter’s shoulder—stepped into that spectrum of patterned light and disappeared.
* * *
A
T
THE
SAME
MOMENT
, identical twin cones of light seemed to emerge from nowhere, forming with the abruptness of a monsoon on a spot on the carefully manicured lawn of a villa overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Brewster breathed a sigh of relief as he and Kudo stepped out of the chaotic swirl of light, back on home ground once more. But as they turned to return to the single-story lodge that served as the temporary base for the Cerberus operation, they saw dark smoke billowing from its walls and heard sounds of gunfire. Cerberus was under attack.
Chapter 8
When Kane stepped into the quantum gateway of the interphaser with Balam, it had been like stepping into water. It seemed to splash all around him with that familiar shush-shushing of the ocean as breakers raced up the beach, the smell of brine piercing his thoughts.
Opening his eyes, Kane looked down and saw the spume of the sea lash against his feet once again. Gulls cawed overhead, their voices sounding as if they were berating one another. Kane watched as his foot left another great indentation in the soft sand, watched as the ocean’s edge hurried up the beach to cover it, filling in the damage with its clear waters.
He was no longer Kane, he realized. He was Ullikummis, the stone feet leaving long indentations in the shining wet sand. He peered up, that sense of disorientation passing in a moment as he realized he had somehow switched bodies, delving into the memories of the stone implant that he wore like a scar across his face. Overlord Enlil was waiting up ahead on a bluff, and beside him stood Ningishzidda, the genetic engineer who had created Ullikummis’s body. Shorter than Enlil, Ningishzidda’s scales were jade-green and he wore lenses over his eyes, each one operating on a mechanical arm that could be lowered in place to increase the magnification of whatever he studied. Both Annunaki squinted against the rich afternoon sunlight, their cloaks catching in the wind.
“Come now, Ullikummis,” Ningishzidda called, his voice duotonal. “The experiment begins.”
* * *
A
UTOMATICALLY
, Kane-Ullikummis hurried across the beach and up the bluff where his father and the
gengineer waited, clambering up the slope in great, loping strides. His body still felt new, and the legs ached with each movement. As part of the ongoing experiment to make him the perfect assassin, Ullikummis had had his legs stretched, and the pins holding them in place burned and throbbed as he moved his muscles.
Dispassionately, Enlil looked at his son as he reached the top of the cliff. His father gave little of himself, and his mother had once described him to the young child as “one who only knows how to take, never to give.” At thirteen years old, Ullikummis failed to really understand what she meant. He saw his handsome father presiding over the golden city of Nippur and he idolized him while others worshipped this so-called god from space.
“Your hands,” Ningishzidda prompted.
Ullikummis held them straight before him, pressing the wrists together as shown while Ningishzidda produced the binding wire. The wire was made of spun silver, and it twinkled in the sun’s rays like a sliver of stolen moonlight. In a moment, Ullikummis’s hands were bound before him, and he watched emotionlessly as Ningishzidda kneeled to bind his ankles.
“There is a possibility that the prince will not survive this,” Ningishzidda said, addressing Lord Enlil.
“Then he will have been a disappointment,” Enlil replied, gazing out over the caroming waves of the ocean.
They did this often, talked about Ullikummis in his presence as if he was not there, as if he were just an object, a thing. He was seven feet tall now, as tall as either lord, yet he felt dwarfed in their company, these great figures who ran the world.
“How did the water feel?” Ningishzidda asked Ullikummis.
“Warm, sir,” Ullikummis replied, “I think.”
It was hard to be sure. Ullikummis was a genetic freak now, his skin grown over by the stone cladding for which he would become known. Under the instruction of Enlil, the gengineer had altered Ullikummis at a basic level, retooling him since before birth. The building blocks had been injected into Ullikummis when he was but an egg grown from Ninlil’s womb. Over the following thirteen years, Ningishzidda had activated each of the changes he had planted within Ullikummis’s DNA, encouraging the child to grow in a certain manner in the way that a master horticulturalist will tend to a rosebush to shape it in a certain way. In essence, the genetic engineer had created this freak, this monster that stood apart from the rest of the Annunaki pantheon, feared and loathed in equal measure.
The strips tight, Ullikummis waddled to the cliff’s edge, peering down at the rolling waves crashing against its side twenty feet below.
“The drop is not very far, Ullikummis,” Ningishzidda reminded him. “Take a breath before you hit the water.”
“Yes, sir...” Ullikummis began to reply, but before the second word had left his lips, Enlil struck him between the shoulder blades, driving the breath from his lungs and pushing him over the edge of the cliff. The great stone creature toppled like a pillar, falling over himself as he hurtled toward the waiting ocean. His chest hurt from the forceful blow he had been struck, and he gasped only the shallowest of breaths before he hit the surface, dropping beneath like a thrown spear.
He had no breath. He was beneath the water, and he had no breath. Ullikummis watched as the last few bubbles escaped from his mouth, racing upward and away even as he plummeted toward the ocean’s bed.
It didn’t matter. Ningishzidda had built things into his biological makeup that would allow him to survive for a while without breath—perhaps indefinitely. His teacher, Upelluri, had shown him breathing exercises, ways to slow his breathing and his need for oxygen. He slipped into the trancelike state immediately, stilling his mind and letting the water surge past him.
Warm where the sun touched it, the water was cooler as soon as he dropped away from its surface. Ullikummis dropped quickly, his body straight, arms and legs tied, falling like the proverbial stone. His body was covered by stone armor, he weighed more than six normal Annunaki of his size and he was still growing.
He opened his eyes, two yellow orbs, each one split with a vertical black line. They were lizard’s eyes, the eyes of the Annunaki. In time, Ningishzidda would replace them, too, but for now they would suffice. They felt hard against the water, as if they wanted to pop out of his skull or to burst. Ullikummis saw the darkness increase around him as he fell farther away from the surface and peered above to see the dwindling light that swirled there in a series of broken white stripes.
Ullikummis was struck by how different things were down here. Broadly speaking, Earth was two environments—the land and the water. Things of the land relied on air to live, and they hurried to and fro on legs or wings or the bottom of their bellies as they tried to keep up with those molecules of oxygen buzzing all about them. Down here, in the water, things ran at a slower pace. The creatures moved with grace, and the plants waited for time to pass, doing little to attract others to them in that desperate struggle to reproduce and spread their seeds. The revelation struck Ullikummis with such obviousness that he almost kicked himself—in holding his breath he could work slower down here, too, no longer dancing to the urgent drumbeat of the surface world. A smile played across the stony crags of his face as the teenager settled down to the task at hand, no longer hurried by the pace set by those around him.
An air breather could drown in an inch of water as easily as he could drown in an ocean. Thus, the depth mattered little to Ullikummis, and the pressure of the ocean was just a minor irritation on his powerful body as he worked slowly at his bonds.
It took three days before he emerged from the ocean, the bonds removed, a way located back to the surface. Kane had been with him the whole time, reliving the memory like an old video film, experiencing every second of those days, Ullikummis’s thoughts now his own.
Ningishzidda had been gratified to see Ullikummis step into the banqueting hall in Nippur, welcoming the lad as one might welcome a dog one thought had run away from home. Enlil was less fervent, acknowledging the boy’s return with just two words:
“Well done.”
* * *
“K
ANE
?” B
ALAM
ASKED
. “Kane, are you okay?”
Kane’s eyes snapped open, and he found himself staring into the upturned bulblike face of the pale-skinned Balam. His head ached, swimming still with the
intrusive memories of his enemy. He had spent three days beneath the ocean in the company of that monster, it seemed, sharing his thoughts. To be brought back from that was jarring, and Kane tamped down the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm him.
He was on the floor of a dark room, its proportions so vast that he could not see the walls. There were shelves and containment units scattered all around, spreading out from him in all directions along great aisles that filled the vast room. Despite its size, the room was windowless, an underground store in the city of Agartha, and it was lit only in patches, small cones of light emanating from the ceiling and leaving much of the vast space in darkness.
“I’m okay,” Kane slurred, pulling himself up to a sitting position and regretting it as soon as he did it. He slumped back, feeling the hard floor knock against the back of his skull and not caring. The ocean swam in his ears, the whisper of memory plucking at his thoughts.
“How long since we got here?” Kane asked, taking slow, meticulous breaths.
“Fifteen minutes,” Balam told him. “I wasn’t comfortable leaving you any longer than that. I’m sorry.”
The chunk of stone embedded beside Kane’s eye was having a terrible effect on him. Each time he traveled via interphaser it would reconstitute with his own flesh, overwhelming his senses with ancient memories of Ullikummis’s life, fully formed reconstructions that Kane had to live through with no ability to change or control. It was like being trapped as a prisoner in one’s own body. This had been the worst one yet, and coming out of it took Kane a few moments, trying desperately to cling to his own thoughts, his own ego. Balam stood at his side, patiently watching as the ex-
Magistrate recovered.
“Let’s get moving,” Kane said, pulling himself off the floor more slowly this time. “No time to waste, right?”
Balam watched the human in admiration as Kane got to his feet. His sense of dedication was exceptional; his bravery knew no limits.
“We shall use the chair,” Balam said, leading the way from the parallax point that had been their destination. The point was marked by a series of concentric circles that would glow when it was in use. Those circles were dim now.
Kane glanced across the room, taking in what he could with a sweep of his eyes. Balam had previously described this as a museum, and it was filled with alien artifacts, shelved or stored in various ways. To Kane’s eyes it seemed more like a storeroom, all the old junk from civilizations past and future tossed into one vast holding pen where they could rot without fear of causing damage, Inca crap next to Egyptian crap, on and on. Kane’s gaze was drawn to a pile of metal machinery, vast turbines held in cylindrical cups like the engines of a jumbo jet. He wondered what they might be.
Balam was walking with a slight limp now, and he winced as he moved. He had suffered some internal damage from a gunshot when Brigid Haight had attacked him, and he had yet to seek proper medical attention. The last time Kane had raised this, just a few hours earlier, Balam had dismissed him in a rare display of pride.
After a brief walk through the wide aisles of the storeroom, Balam and Kane came upon a huge, curve-sided cube that rested beneath a bank of lights. The cube was twenty feet square, and its walls were opaque but shimmering. Scooping his hands together, Balam arrowed his fingertips at the shimmering surface and they cut through it, parting the wall like a waterfall cascade. Kane followed as Balam led the way into the strange, stand-alone room, the wall resealing behind them.
Within, the cube had the rich smell of plant life, the air heady with the scent of living things, a smell like mulch. Kane felt the air like a wall, its richness overwhelming his nostrils for a moment.
The strange room was empty apart from one item held in its very center: a chair. The chair had a curved back and ran down on a single, thick leg like a tree trunk that ended in a splayed structure arrayed across the floor. The back of the chair curved like a spine, and two arms struck out from its sides. The chair was Annunaki in design and Kane had seen its ilk before; in fact, he had used this one just a few hours earlier. It was an Annunaki navigator’s chair designed for use in space travel. Within, the chair held a databank of information that could either be projected or fed directly to the user’s mind, and it could be employed to scan for specific locations and items within the immediate area. In this case, the “immediate area” was of a scale that dwarfed comprehension, given the vast distances involved in space travel, where one navigated in terms of light-years rather than miles.
Balam and Kane had utilized this chair just a few hours before, when Kane had accessed its semiliving circuitry to track down Brigid via the
anam-chara
bond they shared. It was this investigation that had led them to the island fortress of Bensalem, but it transpired that the two of them had arrived too late.
“We shall try again,” Balam said as Kane walked across the room to the lonely chair.
Kane sat down, tentatively placing his arms down on the armrests. After a moment, the chair engaged, and Kane felt a thrumming against his back as the chair itself seemed to come to life. Kane winced as the chair’s arms fired spines into his flesh, piercing the heels of his hands and running along the underside of his forearms like a rush of insect feet. Kane braced himself as the back of the chair shook and thorny, plantlike tendrils emerged from the headrest and started to wrap around his face.
“You’ll need to concentrate on Brigid,” Balam reminded Kane, “focus on the bond you share with her.”
Kane was not sure whether he had closed his eyes at first, as the chair’s visions channeled through him; it was suddenly hard to remember. He was plunged into a new sensory world, a new way of looking, and it felt as if his brain was being pounded with snow. He was linked to Balam by the optical bond, and that link allowed Balam to see what he was seeing, too. Beside him, Balam closed his eyes in a slow blink, letting Kane’s visions rush over him, oozing into them with more comfort than Kane felt.