Chapter 18
Vast chunks of bone plate crashed down as the floor gave way, falling like flakes of cooked fish under the touch of a knife. The hole started in the center of the room, where Ullikummis and Enlil had struggled just seconds before, but it expanded in a matter of seconds, huge gaping cracks splintering across the deck, sending great gouges of flooring tipping away into the darkness below.
Grant cried out, sending his Sin Eater back to its hiding place as he grasped for something—anything—to cling to as he was thrown to the deck. The floor was tipping down to the center, slanting at an ever-increasing angle as it collapsed under its own weight, the structural integrity lost, everything falling toward the hole. In the center of the ruined floor, Ullikummis and Enlil were the first to fall, disappearing beneath the ruined line of the broken deck.
Above Grant, those towering bone arches were crumbling in on themselves, the great columns that held them splintering apart.
Miraculously Grant’s left hand found a ridged break in the floor as he slid backward at an alarming rate, snagging it with a tight grip as hunks of alien masonry crashed past him on their perilous plunge to the floor below.
Grant hung there with one hand, his breathing coming heavily. He was hanging at the edge of the hole, now a ten-foot-wide gap that dominated fully one-third of the room’s floor. His legs hung out over empty space, dangling high above the engine room that he and Rosalia had crossed not an hour earlier.
Grant ducked his head as another chunk of the bone arches hurtled past him, missing his broad shoulder by less than a foot. He watched for a moment as it fell past him, sinking away into the engine room and hitting the distant floor with a crash, sixty feet below. It was pandemonium down there, Grant saw, tiny figures rushing back and forth as the debris rained from the ceiling, the thick cylindrical drives of the great starship now strewed with wreckage.
Grant reached up with his free hand, swinging himself up so that he could grab the edge of the floor. It was rough to his touch, grazing his hand in a biting cut. The deck itself was four feet thick, its strata made up of layered plates of cartilage that glistened like translucent metal.
Grant hung there, catching his breath as he dangled precariously over the huge hole in the flooring, dust and tiles skittering past him amid the ruins of the room.
Then there was another crack, and Grant felt the floor shake, a heavy tremble rumbling through it. Urgently he hurried to pull himself up, legs kicking out as he dragged himself over the edge. Then his chest was on the angled floor, and he was pulling himself up and over the precipice on mighty muscles.
A chunk of bone arch broke away as Grant pulled himself to the floor, collapsing with an almighty boom. The ex-Mag struggled to keep his balance as the already listing floor dipped farther, the column’s impact sending a shock wave through the precarious structure.
The floor beneath Grant broke abruptly, collapsing away from the edge. He found himself falling through empty air, the broken ruins of the floor tumbling downward beside him as gravity tugged him toward his doom.
* * *
R
OSALIA
’
S
SWORD
cut the air with a resounding hum like a bird’s wing as she drove at Brigid Haight. Then, without warning, the whole room shook and the two women were tossed off their feet. From just beyond the sealed doors, they heard the terrific bang as the floor of the next room fell away.
“Grant?” Rosalia gasped, her head going automatically to the doors where a jagged crack was appearing beneath the violet lights. The doors held, chunks of the wall splitting away from the lintel and smashing against the floor with a resounding bang.
Before her, Brigid Haight was recovering, pulling herself back to her feet and running at Rosalia with a brutal ram’s-head punch, the fingers clenched back to drive the heel of her hand into her opponent’s nose.
Rosalia avoided the blow by an inch and slashed her
katana
blade around so that it hacked into Brigid’s side.
Brigid cried out in pain, but already she was following up her own deadly assault, bringing her open right hand up toward Rosalia’s throat. At the same time as Brigid grabbed Rosalia’s neck, she kicked forward with her right leg, booting the dark-haired woman in the shin. Rosalia expelled a lungful of air through clenched teeth at the blow, feeling the pressure close on her throat as Brigid attempted to curtail her next inhalation. The dark-eyed mercenary brought her sword back and around, jabbing at her adversary with its pommel because the close quarters prevented her properly utilizing the blade itself. The artistically tooled base of the
katana
’s handle slammed against Brigid’s chest, smacking just above her right breast with such force it made her take an awkward step backward. Her grip did not fail, and Rosalia found herself dragged by the throat across the hard decking.
The toes of her boots scraped on the floor as Rosalia was pulled forward, and she lashed out again with the hard stump of the sword’s grip, this time striking her red-haired foe across the top of her chest where she had previously delivered a nasty cut from with the blade’s edge. Brigid shrieked in agony as the bloody wound was ripped wider, swearing as the pain struck her. Her grip faltered, and Rosalia lunged, using her free hand to extricate herself from Brigid’s hold and drive the woman back.
Brigid drove her feet against the deck, springing toward Rosalia with a guttural battle cry borne of pure rage.
Rosalia tried to sidestep, moving out of her foe’s path like a toreador. Brigid’s arms stretched wide like an eagle’s wings as it took flight, and the left arm slammed against Rosalia’s gut with enough power to knock the younger woman off her feet. Rosalia rolled backward, the sword skittering from her grasp as she landed in a heap with Brigid astride her. The sword spun through the air, and once again its ebony blade reflected the shimmering lights of the tracking consoles all around as they monitored Little Quav’s progress from hybrid girl to Annunaki goddess. The reflected lights seemed to give Brigid pause, and she stared about her in confusion as the sword clattered to the deck, searching the blue, gold and green lights that played across the consoles at the sides of the room.
Rosalia snatched the advantage, twisting her body to drop Brigid to the deck and rolling herself until she was atop the former Cerberus archivist. There was blood on both their clothes now. Brigid’s chest showed a thick line that went from shoulder blade to shoulder blade through the torn front of her outfit. Rosalia bunched her fist and drew it back, striking Brigid in her face once, twice, thrice. Brigid’s head slammed back into the deck, and her emerald eyes rolled up in their sockets for a moment as unconsciousness threatened to overwhelm her. Then, as Rosalia drew her bloody fist back for another blow, Brigid’s eyes snapped back open and she glared at the woman astride her with savage intent.
“If they rewrote the heroes’ rules, who would you root for?” Brigid asked.
“I don’t know,” Rosalia admitted. “I never cared much about the rules.” With that she drove her fist into Brigid’s face again, striking her across her smirking mouth.
Brigid’s body seemed to lose its strength, and Rosalia felt the woman go limp beneath her. The skin of Rosalia’s knuckles was scraped, her hand spattered with the other woman’s blood. Slowly, warily, Rosalia lifted herself from her opponent’s fallen body and looked up to the stone egg that waited amid the bubbling pool behind her.
As Rosalia pushed herself up, Brigid suddenly moved once again, springing from the deck and powering herself headfirst into Rosalia’s gut. She had been playing possum, the oldest trick in the book.
Rosalia crashed backward as the woman’s head struck her midriff, pushing her back in a flurry of skipping feet. Then suddenly there was nothing else for her to run against; the deck dropped away and instead Rosalia found herself splashing into the pit that dominated the room, with the lithe figure of Brigid Haight crashing down on top of her.
In an instant, both women sank beneath the pearly white surface of the viscous goo.
The chamber known as
Tiamat
’s ante-nursery fell into an eerie silence as the sounds of violence faded into instant memory. For a moment, the room was uncannily quiet. Even the bubbling pool of liquid seemed to hold still for those tense few seconds.
Then a figure emerged from the pool, clambering out of the iridescent liquid and reaching for the edge of the pit. The woman grabbed the side, pulling herself up and out of the nutrient bath in a swift movement before sweeping the gunk from her face. It was Rosalia, the band that held her ponytail lost somewhere beneath the liquid. She stood there, bent over, taking deep breaths as she ran her hands through her sopping wet hair and wondered, Where is Brigid?
The answer came a moment later, as a second figure burst from the pool, arms striving for the edge as she dragged herself out of the gunk.
“Here we go again,” Rosalia muttered.
But she couldn’t have been more wrong.
* * *
G
RANT
OPENED
HIS
EYES
, struggling to recall what had happened. There were sounds coming from a source he couldn’t pinpoint, a rushing of machinery that simply pervaded the air, like the sound of one thousand kettles reaching boiling point in unison. Grant lay on his side amid a pile of debris, hunks of chipped bone scattered all about like detritus from a crematorium. Orange-red light seeped gloomily into his eyes, and for a moment Grant mistook it for blood, raising his hand to his face to try to brush it away. His arm ached and the hand tensed, muscles locking painfully as he brought it up to his face.
“What happened to me?” he muttered, his body sore and numb.
There were figures moving about, waddling away from him as he watched, their bodies enshrouded in dark rags. Grant watched them, trying to recall how he had wound up here.
He had been in the hexagonal room with the bone arches, he remembered, piecing it together slowly. The floor had given way and he had fallen, fallen a long way. Now he lay sprawled in whatever lay beneath—the engine room, somewhere close to the cooling water tanks.
Tentatively Grant pulled himself to a sitting position, his head reeling. He glanced up, spying the hole far above through which he—along with half the room, it seemed—had come crashing. It was a long way up, fifty feet or more, and it made Grant feel dizzy just looking at it. He had fallen all that way, but he remained alive. The incredible weave of the shadow suit had taken some of the impact, he guessed, along with the thick material of his Kevlar coat, bulletproof and apparently sturdy enough to cushion his fall. The rest he had taken himself, and he could feel his whole right side creaking as he moved, bruises doubtless forming.
He was resting atop a structure high above the floor, Grant realized, and this, too, had to have helped to break his fall, stopping him before he had plummeted the full distance between ceiling and floor. It looked like a huge tube, finished in dark metal with a foot-deep dent where his body had struck it with considerable force. There were similar structures all around, arrayed in rows that ran the length of the vast chamber. The room itself was of dimensions impossible to take in with the naked eye, stretching into darkness at one side, the width alone the size of two football fields laid end to end. It was the engine room, Grant recalled as he looked it over, where the dragon ship’s great stardrive was located.
Grant pushed himself up, inching along on his rump to the edge of the cylindrical unit he had landed on and peeking over the side. The floor was a good fifteen feet below, narrow walkways running between the vast tubes where debris from above had come crashing down in a violent hail. Down below Grant saw figures hurrying about as they endeavored to clear away the mess. They were the strange verminlike engineers, dressed in their rag cloaks and wearing the weird lighting units that emanated from their eyes on spectacle-styled rigs.
Grant looked at that drop to the floor, wondering whether he was up for another fall. His muscles ached and it was all he could do to stop from falling.
“Just give me a minute,” he told himself.
From behind him, Grant heard a booming sound over the rumble of machinery and turned in time to see Ullikummis leap onto the pipe he was sitting on from its neighbor seven feet away. The stone-clad giant ran across the cylindrical pipe toward Grant, anger in his molten lava eyes.
“Oh, shit!” Grant snarled as Ullikummis stomped closer.
* * *
T
HE
WORLD
COALESCED
before Kane’s eyes, a wash of purples and mauves whirring through the sky. Color had returned, the clouds above dancing like spinning crystals, snowflakes of color in the air. There was a beach below, a beach with no sea, just a never-ending shore that echoed with the ghost of crashing waves.
Kane clambered down the tree, sensing somehow that he should get back to solid ground. As he did so, he saw the man-shape waiting a short distance away, cast in silhouette by the hidden eye of the sun, edges burning away layer by impossible layer.
“Kane, what are you doing?” Balam called from that distant place that was just next to his ear. “Are you lost?”
“I’m not lost,” Kane said, dismissing Balam’s concerns. “Where’s Grant?”
Lakesh’s voice piped back from the Commtact in Kane’s head after a moment, as he checked Grant’s transponder feed. “He’s still aboard
Tiamat,
” Lakesh confirmed. “Heart rate elevated. What do you intend to do?”
“You called it string theory,” Kane replied. “Layer upon layer of dimensions all intersecting, all a part of the whole we never see.”
“Yes, but...”
“I’m going to go kill me a god, Lakesh,” Kane stated. “I’m going to cut a gash through every one of those dimensions and kill me an Annunaki space god.”
At the base of the tree, Ullikummis waited like a statue, his flesh searing away over and over as he stood upon the shifting vermilion sands.