by James Axler
Domi’s crimson eyes met Rosalia’s for a moment as she writhed in agony, and she spit out three words, each one strained with desperation. “Get…me…out.”
“What is it with you Cerberus people?” Rosalia muttered to herself. “Everything in such a rush all the time. ‘Less haste, more speed.’ That’s what Sister Superior used to tell me.”
* * *
SEVERAL DECKS BELOW, Kudo struggled to regain his senses as the water creature threw him aside. It was similar to the others he had fought, only this one was thinner, as if emaciated. Kudo looked at the floor at the creature’s feet, saw the bare trickle of water it was drawing from to generate its body.
“All over for you,” Kudo snarled as he dived at the watery figure, arms outstretched. “Your source is about to dry up.”
At that moment the second set of charges went off with a pop, and a spray of acid fired in all directions, burning into the body of the liquid thing and striking Kudo across the face. Kudo’s lips pulled back as the burning pain hit him.
From somewhere high above him in the belly of the ship, Kudo heard the sound of lightning ripping the air apart. Then the water struck him and he was swept off his feet.
* * *
GRANT LAY DISORIENTED on the decking, trying desperately to gather his wits as a great chunk of catwalk crashed down just feet from his face. Enlil was stronger than him—much stronger, in fact, with the natural body armor of an Annunaki’s scaled hide. As Grant struggled to get back to his feet, Enlil yanked him from the floor by both hands, his claws digging into the armored weave of Grant’s shadow suit.
“Your infantile race is finished, Cerberus man,” Enlil raged.
Grant sneered at him. “I’ve heard that before,” he spit, driving the muzzle of the Sin Eater into Enlil’s gut. He pulled the trigger, sending a stream of bullets into Enlil’s torso from point-blank range.
Enlil howled in agony, tossing Grant aside as he stumbled back, doubled over. Grant slammed against the deck once more, struggled to hold on to consciousness as dark spots swam in front of his eyes.
Clutching the oozing wounds at his belly, Enlil loomed over Grant, driving one cruelly clawed foot down on the ex-Mag’s right hand, locking it—and the Sin Eater it held—onto the deck.
“Tiamat waited patiently for the hybrid barons to rise to power,” he told Grant, “sufficiently developed shells that we, her children, might have bodies in which we could manifest and grow. That process took centuries, with millennia of planning behind it. The Annunaki are infinite—we believed we had time. Knew so.”
Grant sneered at him, struggling to loose himself from where the overlord’s foot had him pinned. “We destroyed Tiamat, destroyed all of you,” Grant taunted. “We didn’t realize that, like any cancer, you weren’t really dead—you had just gone into remission. But that’s fine, ’cause now I get to beat you all over again.”
Enlil glared at him, and Grant saw something twinkling in the palm of the monster’s left hand—a tiny circular device that appeared to be carved from charred bone. “I have come to realize that a race with infinite time stultifies, their plans never realized. So I have changed the plan, accelerated the schedule.”
Grant glared at him as he struggled to free his trapped arm.
“Your race is finished, Cerberus man,” Enlil told him, a cruel sneer appearing on his lips. “Replaced forever on the planet you have clung to like an infection.”
Grant watched helplessly as the device in the overlord’s hand began to glow, a series of lights coursing across its surface. There were colors there that Grant didn’t even have names for, fractal colors from other dimensions not meant for human eyes.
“What…?” Grant asked, still struggling to free his hand.
“Tiamat is ready,” Enlil explained. “The download begins.”
Past Enlil’s shoulders, Grant could see movement in the cylindrical canisters that dominated the room as more electrical blasts ripped across the ceiling like a thunderstorm. The cylinders were shaking as the things that waited inside shuddered into life.
* * *
STILL KEEPING HER DISTANCE, Rosalia studied Domi’s cylinder, the dog at her side. There were no seals, no locks that she could see, no handles or keypads that might operate the device. Presumably, Domi had tried to push from the inside, which meant that the force wall could not be simply shoved aside.
“I wonder if it can be cut,” Rosalia mused, muttering to herself as she glanced at the dog. “Let’s hope so, huh?”
Then, with a determined thrust, she drove the tip of the katana into the front of the unit and a web of sparks fired into life across its surface.
* * *
GRANT HEARD SOMETHING moving behind him now, too, and he automatically turned his head, seeing a wall full of cylinders shaking where they waited.
“The hybrid barons were formed of human DNA,” Enlil explained to Grant, pitching his voice high over the sounds of the rocking cylinders all around them, “and in turn a downloaded viral catalyst allowed them to mutate into their ultimate, glorious form as Annunaki. These past months I have worked with Tiamat to bypass that procedure, to turn humans into Annunaki with no need of that wasteful, initial mutation.
“What you see here before you are not resting Annunaki, Grant—they are the bodies of your own kind, altered forever into the glory of the Annunaki. You apekin—you humans—are the building blocks of our new pantheon. And thus, you have become obsolete.”
With an incredible show of strength, Grant finally pulled his hand free, the claws of Enlil’s foot ripping great gouts of skin from his wrist in the process. “Not today, snake-face,” he announced as he pulled the Sin Eater up to target Enlil’s head.
* * *
A SHOWER OF SPARKS BURST forth as Rosalia drove the two-foot-long katana, point-first, into the front side of the cylinder that held Domi. Domi’s pained shriek turned into a desperate cough as she struggled to take a breath.
“Hang on, chicken,” Rosalia urged, talking as much to herself as to the trapped albino warrior. Sparks like lightning played across the steel of the blade, zinging with a resonance like an insect’s wings behind glass.
Beside her, the unnamed dog backed away, its pale eyes fixed on the hideous light show that was playing out across the cylinder. To the dog’s right, the control panel was blistering as electricity raced across its surface, firing wanton bolts of power around the room as it went into an irreversible meltdown. The dog barked once even as its mistress slashed the blade through the force wall that held Domi pinned in place.
Suddenly the amber strips of light that had raced across the cylinder went out and Rosalia heard Domi cry out. The dark-haired mercenary clung to the handle of the sword as if magnetized, unable to let go as energy coruscated up its silver blade.
Behind her, the dog growled angrily, and then Rosalia tumbled backward as she finally pulled the blade free of the cylinder. And what she saw next would stay with her to the grave.
* * *
AS GRANT PULLED THE TRIGGER of the Sin Eater, the whole chamber shook with a low rumble. His blast went wide, even as both combatants looked around them to see what was happening. On every side, the amber-banded cylinders had gone dark. And, emerging from those silent cylinders lining the walls, dozens of Annunaki had awoken, their eyes fixed on Grant and Enlil.
Enlil’s laughter echoed through the belly of Tiamat, grating on Grant’s ears like the sound of a braying hyena.
“Say goodbye, Grant apekin,” Enlil boasted as more than two hundred Annunaki came to life around him, stumbling like mannequins across the water-lined floor of the vast chamber as their bodies were charged with life. “Your gods have returned to judge you.”
“Oh, shit,” Grant growled as two hundred snake-faced gods came hurrying toward him from all sides.<
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Chapter 25
Kudo was plunged beneath the water, losing his footing as he was dragged away by the current. Caught up in the torrent, his face burning with acid, Kudo was tossed away from the ruined water tanks as their contents spilled out across the deck. The sword he had been holding was wrenched from his hand in an instant by that sudden burst of water, and he found himself spinning so violently that, for a moment, he lost all sense of where he was.
The water was spewing from the twin water tanks with increasing force, ripping at the small holes Kudo’s chargers had made and making them larger as the pressure was released and the contents spilled over the floor. Kudo was below the water now, eyes open in the semidarkness as he struggled to find the surface, to find air. His arms whirred as he tried to right himself, slamming into the deck beneath him as he was swept up in the thunderous surge.
Then he surfaced, bobbing up above the water line for a moment before disappearing beneath once more. The whole of the vast works room was filling with water from the ruined tanks, and Kudo estimated there must already be enough water spilled to fill three Olympic-size swimming pools, and the tanks still had more to disgorge.
His armor was dragging him down, the warrior realized, its weight heavy with the wetness. He loosened one of the buckles at his shoulder, clawing at it with desperate hands as he struggled to release it. There was a surge in the current then, and a blurt of air escaped from Kudo’s mouth in a series of fat bubbles, scampering to the water’s surface in mockery of his own desires. Kudo watched them go as he plucked at the buckle on his armor. The bubbles hurried past his left ear, running diagonal to his vision and showing him that the surface was not where he had imagined it; the water had already thrown him into confusion.
Then the buckle was open, and he yanked at the chest piece of his supple armor, pulling himself out of it as his feet suddenly scuffed the deck’s surface. Kudo bent his knees and kicked off, leaving the chest armor behind him as he swam up to the surface.
The water was already eight feet deep and the outpouring from damaged water tanks—now thirty feet behind Kudo—showed no signs of abating. Lights shimmered into luminance on the walls, and Kudo became subconsciously aware of a buzzing tickle behind his ears—some kind of automated alert signal, he guessed, the kind that might be perceived differently by the spaceship’s otherworldly owners.
The water continued to hurtle outward from the vast water tanks, spilling across the room like the contents of a tipped bowl. It was all Kudo could do to remain afloat, taking breath after watery breath as he was thrown across the vast room on the spindrift. In front of his eyes, things were trying to form on the surface—figures like the ones he and Kishiro had battled with over the past few hours. He saw their faces and necks trying to take shape on the ruffled surface of the water, malformed like something stillborn, aborted. There was too much water now, moving so fast that they could not draw enough into themselves to make a shape.
Kudo was hurrying toward one of the ladders that dotted the room now, and he shifted his body, reaching out for it as he bobbed passed, his hand locking around one of the rungs. In a moment, Kudo had pulled himself up, and he began climbing the ladder out of the rapidly filling chamber below, hurrying toward the upper deck.
* * *
OVER TWO HUNDRED SETS of clawed feet marched across the bone-tiled deck of Tiamat, their talons clacking on the hard tiles.
“Witness the God machine in action,” Enlil decreed as the new born Annunaki paced across the deck toward where he loomed over Grant. “Witness the final evolution of humanity, at last become the very thing you worshiped.”
Grant raised his Sin Eater, knowing full well that he had zero chance of defeating more than two hundred reborn Annunaki with the tiny weapon. He had been a fighter all his life, once a Magistrate and then a rebel for Cerberus, a warrior for all humankind. Even now, in the face of impossible odds, he would not give up, would never admit defeat. Around him the walls of the chamber resounded with the sparking sound of unleashed energy as chunks of Tiamat were ripped away and came crashing to the floor in flaming bursts like comets.
Taking a steadying breath, Grant centered the Sin Eater on the nearest of the Annunaki as he chased across the tiled floor toward him, just behind Enlil. The creature was at least seven feet in height, his naked body defined by taut muscles and spiny ridges across the crest of his skull, the armorlike scales a glistering platinum that shone like the moon. His eyes were a vibrant indigo like the depths of the ocean, and his lips were pulled back in an ugly sneer. Grant knew that look, knew what it meant—it was bloodlust. Reborn, the Annunaki wanted blood, wanted carnage, wanted death.
Grant stroked the trigger of the Sin Eater, calculating where the Annunaki would be when the bullet struck. The Sin Eater bucked in his hand, spitting its deadly cargo at the first of the fearsome lizards. But to Grant’s astonishment, the Annunaki stepped away, out of the path of the bullet, and he watched with incredulity as the platinum-hued Annunaki reached out—not for him but for Enlil, grasping the cruel overlord by the back of his head with such force that Enlil was thrown to the decking.
Grant watched confused as more of the reborn Annunaki hurried to assist the first, piling on Enlil as he struggled beneath their weight.
“What the hell—?” Grant asked himself as, one after another, the reborn Annunaki came to join in the massacre of Enlil.
* * *
ROSALIA LAY IN A CRUMPLED heap on the floor, watching as her dog stood beside the control console, its scruffy body shuddering with powerful vibrations. Knotted and mangy though it was, the dog’s fur stood on end as if brushed with static and its mouth hung open, the jaw slack. Emanating from the dog, dozens of ghost images leaped out, their spirits charging toward the sparking control console as electricity played across it. They looked like the dog, with their long jaws and crouching bodies, but they looked like something else, too. Rosalia didn’t know what it was.
Something within the dog was entering the console, she realized. Something that was disrupting everything that Enlil had worked for.
“You brave animal,” she chastised the hound, reaching her hand to the dog as it wavered on its four legs, shaking in front of the wildly sparking machinery. “If we both get out of this alive, I’ll get you a prize steak, promise.”
As her hand neared, Rosalia felt the incredible, breathtaking force throbbing from the animal, playing across her outstretched palm in a wave of heat and power. The dog didn’t react, didn’t even move other than that terrible trembling. Instead, it continued staring at the control column, and Rosalia noticed something she had never seen in its familiar face before. The dog’s eyes were turning dark, a brown tinge swelling within the once-white pupils.
Rosalia watched helplessly as the dog shuddered and dropped, its body sagging as it collapsed to the dark plate of the deck. Whatever they were, the spirits had left it, piling into the console and disseminating through the waiting bodies of the Annunaki.
As Rosalia reached for it, the dog whimpered, its dark eyes looking plaintively at her. “It’s okay, boy,” she whispered. “It’s okay now. You can rest now.”
The dog snuffled as it lay on the deck in front of her, not moving as she stroked its head one last time. It felt so hot, as if its flesh had been scalded beneath the fur. “You just rest,” Rosalia whispered, her hand running through the dog’s matted fur as the life ebbed out of it. “Good boy. Nice little dog.”
Behind Rosalia, a woman’s voice groaned. The dark-haired mercenary turned and saw Domi lying there in front of the broken cylinder, her white body stained with dirt. The charred katana lay beside her, its once-silver surface turned obsidian black.
Rosalia stroked the dog’s mangy fur one last time, feeling its belly rise and fall as it struggled to take its last breath. As it did so, Rosalia muttered a prayer under her breath,
her eyes never leaving the sorrowful eyes of her loyal friend. Then she turned, taking a deep, steadying breath as she went to help Domi.
“Come on, Cerberus chica,” she said as with weary limbs she reached down for the albino. “Probably best if we get out of here before something else blows up.”
* * *
CAUGHT UTTERLY UNAWARE, Enlil fell to that first blow, crashing to Tiamat’s deck before he even realized he had been hit. Disoriented, he lay sprawled on the floor for a moment, reeling as blow after blow struck his body as more Annunaki attacked. Around him, the wombship herself was falling apart, quaking insanely as the unleashed energy rushed across her bow.
They were piling on him now, one after the other, a great angry mob of perfect Annunaki bodies, each one naturally armored with scales as tough as metal plate, each possessing the strength of five men or more. He had wanted them to be perfect, and so they were. Perfect predators. Enlil, too, was strong, a natural survivor and one of the greatest Annunaki who had ever walked the Earth. It took him but a single breath to begin fighting back, striking out at the first attacker even as two more came to assist him, and three more after them.
But he was outnumbered. Every last one of the reborn Annunaki had turned against him, attacking him like a swarm, their uncompromising hatred for him like a single thought shared between a whole community. A uni-thought.
Enlil could not get to his feet, could not even get his arms up properly to protect himself. As he lashed out with one clawed hand, striking a coal-scaled Annunaki female across the jaw with such force that her lips split, another Annunaki had kicked him in the back, the sharp talons of its toes ripping across his scales where his rib cage met with his belly.
