by James Axler
Gingerly, Brigid picked up the unit to the right and carried it in both hands to the platform where Little Quav was waiting. Kneeling for a moment, she flipped open a hidden door at the base of the pyramid-shaped machine, and her slender fingers traced a quick tattoo across the control buttons revealed within. The interphaser bleeped a moment, chirruping to itself as it accessed the cosmic pathways that would be used for this journey outside of traditional space.
Brigid stepped back as the interphaser began its automated ignition sequence, reaching for Quav’s hand as the unit came to life.
In his throne, Ullikummis dropped out of the meditative state he had been in, his eyes resuming their fearsome glow like the lighting of a fire.
“The final sequence begins,” he stated, the words rumbling through the throne room like distant thunder. “The endgame has arrived.”
The three-year-old child known as Quav grasped Brigid’s hand, squeezing it tighter as Ullikummis—genetically her son from four millennia before—drew himself out of the throne and strode across the room toward the raised platform containing the parallax point. Around them, the interphaser seemed to be splitting apart, a cone of many colors launching all around it, widening as it clambered upward through the room and, nonsensically, mirroring this action deep into the floor, the sight replacing the stone tiles there. Witchfire crackled within that dark swirl of colors, firing across its depths like lightning.
“I am the bringer of death,” Ullikummis chanted, “the destroyer of souls, the alpha and the omega, the vanishing point. I am the Godkiller.”
With those words, Ullikummis stepped onto the raised platform, the dogs trotting obediently along at his heels as he joined Brigid Haight and the girl who would be Ninlil amid the glowing quantum portal of the interphaser. The jump had begun.
* * *
THE CATHEDRAL BELL was chiming in Luilekkerville, a continuous droning clang pressing against the silence. Inside, the cathedral was packed. Almost one thousand individuals had crammed themselves within its confines, listening to the bell’s droning as Minister Morrow strode proudly among them, a broad, toothy grin on his heavily jowled face. Many of the congregation had seats but some were forced to stand, piling in through several doorways where the shadow of a man—elongated and alien—stretched into the aisle beyond through some quirk of the architecture. Every last building in the ville had emptied, disgorging its occupants, young or old, to attend this special service.
“Alone we were weak, lost, we were victims,” Morrow intoned as he strode up to the cathedral’s central plinth. “Alone we were afraid. Those who grew up here, who witnessed the fall of Snakefish, will recall the feelings of real fear that gripped them as their world collapsed about their ears.”
There were voices of assent from the congregation, calls of support and a hubbub of agreement from farther back among the swilling crowds.
“But together,” Minister Morrow called, thrusting his clenched right fist in the air above his head where everyone could see, “together we are strong. Together we cannot be defeated. Together we are the heralds of the glorious future, together we are the heralds of god.
“Each one of you here today is my brother, my sister,” Morrow continued. “Each one of you is a part of the future body, each one of you a building block for eternity.
“We are strong because we are stone!” Morrow shouted, opening the fist he held straight above his head. Revealed within, a rock rested on his palm, just three inches across and dark as a shadow. As the congregation cheered and whooped their support, the rock began to glow, at first faintly in a soft peachy orange, before rapidly becoming brighter until it was burning a lustrous red as rich as lava.
“We are stone,” Morrow chanted, and the people of the congregation took up the chant, shouting their allegiance to the glorious future of Ullikummis.
In Morrow’s hand, the stone glowed brighter still, illuminating the altar where the minister stood, painting his simple robes in rich scarlet and vermilion.
“We are stone,” Morrow called, and a thousand voices echoed the same words back to him. “We are stone.”
As the voices became louder, calling in time with the chiming bell, the air began to change above the minister’s head, poised as he was at the very center of the towering structure. The air seemed to take on a tangibility as a swirl of color began to form, small and faint at first but unmistakably present all the same.
The congregation continued to chant as the swirl above the minister grew bigger and more pronounced. The colors pulsed and swirled, dancing with one another like the aurora borealis, changing as they swam in the air. And somewhere deep in the midst of that multihued pattern, pencil-thin fingers of lightning began to crackle and flash.
Morrow continued to chant, his open hand raised in the air, brandishing the glowing stone like Prometheus bringing fire from the gods. The stone felt hotter now, not burning but like the feel of another person’s skin, lover to lover.
“I am stone.”
The crowd continued to repeat the phrase over and over as the wormhole opened behind their leader, widening like a circular window into the quantum ether.
Unknown to the congregation, all across the country, dozens more of the wormholes were opening as the faithful were called by Ullikummis, a widely scattered flock of believers called into service by their savior.
In Luilekkerville, the hole in space was as tall as a house now, taking up two stories of the cathedral’s innards, poised like a disk in the center of the massive enclosed space, like an eye looking into the infinite. The colors swirled and clashed and witchfire flashed across its depths, the call of Ullikummis echoing from the infinity rent to tug at the souls of the chanting congregation.
Suddenly, Morrow turned to face the expanding circular disk, seeing it properly for the first time where it swirled behind him. His lips continued to mouth the chant—“We are stone”—but the sound died before it left his throat, snatched away by the swirling elemental forces that he was staring into. Minister Morrow looked into the abyss, his human eyes trying to make sense of the fractal patterns of the quantum ether, as he led his congregation into its shining depths. The disk looked like a bruise, blacks and purples and indigo blues all mixing together as it grew larger and larger, a hundred other shades swirling within its tesseract depths.
And if the end of the world had a color, then this was it.
Chapter 2
The spaceship Tiamat was crumbling about them, chunks of its wall plating fracturing away, dropping into the ankle-deep water that seemed to fill every passageway. A man and woman were racing through the curving artery that ran in a loop at the exterior wall of the ship’s hull, and the man carried another figure in his muscular arms. He was much larger than the woman in his arms, and he made the task of carrying her seem effortless as he and his companion sought the makeshift entryway they had blasted in the ship’s hull just a few hours earlier.
Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville who now served the Cerberus operation. He was a huge man in his late thirties, wide-shouldered with skin like polished mahogany. His head was shaved clean, and he wore a trim goatee beard that surrounded his broad mouth in a black circle. His clothes were in disarray, as were those of his companions, and his heavy boots splashed in the water as he leaped over the riblike protrusions that lined the circular-walled corridor. Grant wore a long coat over his shadow suit, both of them made of black fabric, the former fabricated from a Kevlar weave. The shadow suit boasted remarkable properties. Snugly fitting its wearer like a second skin, the one-piece garment had armorlike features sufficient to deflect a blade, redistribute kinetic shock and offer protection from environmental hazards.
Grant continued to run, ducking as another chunk of the walls tumbled away in a crash of shell-like material. “Keep moving,” he instructed his companion, though the command was unnec
essary. Perhaps he was really talking to himself, driving himself on as they both hurried toward the rent in the hull through which they might escape this nightmare.
Running just a few paces behind Grant was his companion, a beautiful woman with olive skin and long dark hair that swung behind her in a ponytail. In her early twenties, Rosalia was a mercenary who had recently hooked up with the Cerberus organization during the ongoing Ullikummis infiltration. She had tucked the cuffs of her combat pants into the supple leather boots she wore, kicking out with long legs to keep pace with her taller companion. Her open denim jacket showed the shadow suit she wore beneath, and she had a Ruger P-85 pistol stashed in a low-slung holster on her right hip and a katana sword tucked through her belt loop across the opposing hip. The sword was two feet in length, and the blade had been blackened by flames to the color of charcoal. Rosalia’s chest rose and fell as she took deep breaths to keep up with Grant’s long strides, and her deep brown eyes seemed to burn with rage.
Grant carried another woman in his arms, her petite frame much smaller than Rosalia’s. Her name was Domi and she was an albino, her skin a deathly white, her short hair the creamy color of bone where it framed her sharp-planed face in a pixie cut. Right now her pale flesh was marred with streaks of black where ash had smeared across her skin, and her eyes were closed in slumber. Open, those eyes were a vibrant, satanic red, like two pure rubies. Domi wore simple combat clothes in dark colors, but the clothes had been torn in places following a recent struggle.
As the group reached sight of the hole in the hull of the crumbling spaceship, Grant heard someone calling to him. Up ahead, he saw the familiar form of their other companion—a modern-day samurai warrior called Kudo, who was dressed in supple armor and had a long sword sheath depending from his belt. Kudo was one of the Tigers of Heaven, a group of fearsome warriors who had joined forces with the Cerberus exiles as they defended themselves from the hostile campaign by Ullikummis.
As Grant and Rosalia got closer, they saw that Kudo’s face was streaked red across the left-hand side where something had marred and puckered the skin, and the white of his left eye had turned a chilling bloodred. His dark hair was plastered to his head in short, wet curls.
“What happened to you?” Grant asked as they made their way together to the hole in the ruined hull.
“I mistimed the charge,” Kudo explained wryly before asking about his missing partner, Kishiro.
“He didn’t make it,” Grant admitted solemnly as he ducked through the door-sized hole that an explosive charge had left in the ship’s outer hull.
The ship was grounded. In fact, it had never flown, at least not in its current form. An Annunaki starship of legendary repute, Tiamat had been mistakenly identified in ancient Sumerian mythology as the mother to the Annunaki race of space gods. More accurately, she was a mother ship, an organic machine that housed the genetic templates of the Annunaki. She had returned to Earth’s orbit several years ago at the start of the twenty-third century, downloading the genetic codes that brought about the Annunaki royal family’s rebirth from their cocoonlike shells as the nine hybrid barons, but had later self-destructed in an explosion that rocked the skies. Grant had been there when the destruct order had been given, and he had watched from the porthole of a fleeing lifeboat as Tiamat went up in flames.
However, the spacecraft had reappeared just a few weeks before on the banks of the River Euphrates, Iraq, her familiar dragon shape towering over an empty city formed of her skeletal wings. Grant had no possible way of knowing, but the ship had been grown from a seed planted by Enlil, the cruelest of the Annunaki overlords. Enlil had tapped the ship’s incredible reservoir of knowledge to fast-track an army of Annunaki, warping the DNA of any human who came close to the skeletal city. However, something had been wrong deep within the codes of Tiamat herself, and the ship was now deteriorating at an incredible rate, falling apart as its huge water tanks bled out.
Outside, the sun sat high in the sky, its midmorning burn pounding warmly against Grant’s skin.
“We should destroy it,” Kudo insisted, staring angrily back at the shovel-shaped head of the spaceship that rested on the riverbank.
“We don’t have anything that can do that,” Grant told him as Rosalia emerged from the raw-edged hole in the hull, “but we can come back. Bomb the wicked thing out of existence once and for all.”
* * *
DEEP INSIDE the dragon-form ship, deep in the belly of the beast, Enlil was fighting for his life.
Enlil, a high-ranking member of Annunaki royalty, and self-styled overlord of the human race, was a beautiful creature. He stood over six feet tall, with a crest of spines atop his head that added almost a foot to his already impressive height. His scaled skin was the color of gold dipped in blood, of sunset in the tropics, and it covered his muscular body like a suit of malleable armor. His chest and arms were bare, as were his clawed feet, while his legs were covered in loose, billowing breeks. Other than that, Enlil wore a bloodred cloak cinched around his shoulders that trailed down to brush at the tops of his ankles. The cloak was torn, for it had suffered during the current struggle with his enemies.
His enemies were even now swarming at him from all sides, like a cloud of insects attacking an intruder. Naked, it was clear that each of them came from the same race as Enlil, their muscular lizard bodies moving with the same eerie grace that characterized the overlord’s gestures. They were adult Annunaki, full-grown yet they had only just come to life. The experiment engineered by Overlord Enlil had backfired terribly in the final moments thanks to the intervention of the Cerberus crew. The Annunaki had been grown in the vats of Tiamat, twisted around the DNA templates of trapped human bodies to create a new pantheon of Annunaki space gods. Even now, their egglike birthing pods stood silently around the scene of carnage, lining the sides of the vast room where streams of water burbled and catwalks grown from bone ran overhead.
Ill lit, the room was approximately the size of two football fields, with railless stairwells dotted around, each reaching up to the second level where the catwalks ran. To one side, a burning column belched smoke into the vast room, spewing out lightninglike shards of electricity toward the arched ceiling high above, illuminating the room in violent staccato bursts. Swathes of the roof were falling away in great chunks, crashing to the floor in explosions of dust and water.
And amid all of this, Enlil was struggling with the reborn forms of the Annunaki. There were 213 of them in all. Each one was unique, some male, some female, their scales a rainbow of achingly beautiful colors shimmering in the half-light that ebbed through the birthing chamber. Some had spines across their brows like Enlil’s, while others featured a crown of bony protrusions around their skulls.
Believing himself to be the last survivor of his race, Enlil had grown these bodies to re-create the glory of the Age of the Annunaki, who had ruled the Earth more than five thousand years before. Prior to Enlil’s experimentation, the rebirth of the Annunaki had involved a slow procedure of growing hybrid bodies that could accommodate the genetic changes needed to transform, chrysalis-like, into their Annunaki final form. Enlil had altered that, utilizing a much quicker—though far more traumatic—process to skip a step and change the basic human template into one suitable for the Annunaki. His plans had been interrupted by Grant, Domi, Rosalia and Kudo, and the waiting bodies had been awoken too soon, their memory downloads incomplete. In place of the memories of his brethren, Enlil found that an unexpected third party had been at play, prepped to snatch the bodies for their own. This group were the Igigi, the one-time slave caste of the Annunaki who were recorded in legend as “those who watch and see.” Without doubt, the Igigi had “watched and seen” the moment to finally strike against their one-time master.
According to Sumerian myth, there had been one thousand Igigi who served the Annunaki, and each one was considered to be a god by the human populace. However,
their role had been to facilitate the day-to-day running of the Annunaki empire on Earth, and they had never achieved names. When Enlil had unleashed the Great Flood to cleanse the Earth of the human race, he had dismissed the Igigi, leaving them to drown as nothing more than collateral damage. But a group of rebellious Igigi had been wise to his plan and had hidden their memories in a shadow box until such time as they had bodies that could house them once more. When Enlil had generated this new army of Annunaki gods, the Igigi had seized their chance and now their souls occupied the Annunaki shells in place of the planned downloads. Now 213 fiercely powerful bodies had turned on the Annunaki overlord who had tried to extinguish them many millennia ago—213 angry souls.
Enlil had been knocked down to the floor by their vicious attacks, and more of the Igigi-possessed
Annunaki swarmed on him, kicking and punching him from all sides as he lay on his back. A mound of bodies pressed against him, crushing Enlil to the floor by the sheer weight of numbers. At the bottom of that mound, Enlil was struggling for breath as five or six strong Annunaki bodies crushed against his chest, clawed hands grasping for his throat, reaching for his eyes.
Then, with an almighty effort, Enlil flinched his body, sharp and sudden, and three of the monstrous forms were thrust away from him, careering into the canal streams that filtered across the room.
Enlil shoved upward with both hands, pushing two more of the figures away even as more attackers neared.
“Get away,” Enlil snarled, batting at a clawed foot as it swung at his face.
The kicker lost his balance, toppling back as Enlil twisted his grip. As he did so, another Annunaki drove a heel into Enlil’s flank, driving the breath from his lungs as he rolled across the hard floor.
Enlil sprawled on his face, his scarlet cloak in disarray about him. There was water here—a shallow channel that ran the length of the room. Four feet wide, it was used to transport items across the vast distance of the chamber. Enlil felt the water’s coolness lash against his face, reviving him instantaneously as the Annunaki figures stalked toward him, the sharp claws of their feet clacking against the bonelike tiling in a rising drumbeat of hate.
