by James Axler
An instant later, Sela Stone found herself stepping out of the rift onto an expanse of sand close to a riverbank. Hundreds of people were massing there—perhaps thousands—each one loyal to her master, Ullikummis, a vast sea of people clamoring for space.
Up ahead, Sela could see the silhouette of a dragon, its craning neck lunging into the skies as if to smell the low clouds that danced before the morning sun. The dragon was five or six miles away, at least, yet it was so immense that its head towered over the vista of the Euphrates River, and its wings spread out, reaching to perhaps a mile away from where she stood. The wings were ragged and skeletal, their bones pale-colored struts like some weird panorama of buildings.
Behind Sela, the dozen farmers had followed, stepping from the rift in space to add their bodies to the burgeoning army of Ullikummis. They followed not because of the obedience stone—unlike Sela, they hadn’t received an implant—but because they wanted to believe that there could be this golden future, the one that Ullikummis, their stone-clad fallen angel, had promised.
Sela, like a number of others among the thousands-strong crowd, felt the call because of the stone that had been implanted in her head. Known as an obedience stone, it was a tiny chip from Ullikummis’s own body. He could grow these at will, tearing them from his body like buds from a plant. All of them had a droplet of rudimentary sentience, enough that they could speak to their hosts, bonding with them and influencing their thoughts. Accepting the obedience stone was traumatic, for the stone had to push through the skin to bond itself to the user, but this pain had come to be seen as a rite of passage among the faithful, a sacrifice they made in their devotion to the new god. After all, the faithful preached, the stone created a new way of understanding the world, a new life, and as such, it was a birth and any birth was characterized as much by pain as by joy, was it not?
The stone pulsed within Sela, hugging the lobes of her brain, its tendrils enveloping her mind. The stone brought an enlightenment, a freedom for the bearer. It was an entheogen, bringing to all people who used it a sense of being a part of their god. The stones acted as markers, too, the same way that the transponders were used by the Cerberus people, and it was through these locators that Ullikummis had reached out for his most faithful, opening the multiwindow of the quantum interphase jump in a way that had never been seen before. A hundred quantum gateways had all opened upon the same location—on this location. This, too, was something that Ullikummis had learned in the Ontic Library, accessing its sentient banks of knowledge to discover new ways to utilize the Annunaki technology. These were old secrets, things that had been forgotten millennia ago. Ullikummis could generate parallax points where there were none, and he could fold quantum space in such a way that he could jump between parallax points, ambushing even the most wary of opponents. The old ways were the new ways.
* * *
“DAMMIT!” ROSALIA CURSED as she and Grant prowled warily along the edge of the city, as close as they dared get to the massing army on the banks of the Euphrates.
Grant glared at her. “You want to keep it down?” he warned.
When he looked he saw that Rosalia was holding her left wrist and her teeth were clenched in pain.
“What is it?” Grant asked more gently, regretting his knee-jerk reaction.
“Stone’s playing up,” the dark-haired woman answered, breathing hard through her nostrils.
“Run that by me again?” Grant requested, clearly confused.
“I have the stone inside me,” Rosalia said, “you know that. Damn thing’s pounding against my nerve like a fucking metronome.” She winced, holding down hard on her wrist until the pain passed.
Like Sela Sinclair, Rosalia had one of the obedience stones implanted beneath her skin. But through her own subtle manipulations of her flesh, her stone had remained locked at her wrist, unable to attach itself properly and so bond with her. The stone was of a different variety to Sinclair’s, as it had come not from Ullikummis but from one of his faithful troops. Besides affecting a person’s thought processes, the stone was also used to operate hidden stone locks designed by Ullikummis within his bases, a little like a remote control opened a garage door.
In the earliest days of the Ullikummis religious movement, those with stones would identify those without by just being in their presence. That facet had become less important over time, as more people had joined the Ullikummis movement willingly, truly believing that a new and better world was coming.
Left unchecked, the stones would affect the thinking of anyone who had one, but Rosalia had assured the Cerberus people that she had hers under control. “It only works on the weak-minded,” she had dismissed contemptuously. However, few people knew how much effort Rosalia put in to maintaining the rock’s position beneath her skin, using a needle to cut into her own flesh daily to prevent it from locking there and so forming a more permanent—and dangerous—bond.
Now the rock inside her was drumming against her nerves like something alive.
“You’re all right?” Grant asked.
Rosalia nodded. “Just go.”
Ahead of them, the rift continued to swell, a great wound in the sky. Lightning crackled in its depths as it blurted out more people into the already swollen ranks of Ullikummis’s troops. Among them were the hooded security teams who had assumed the place of the Magistrates, their malleable flesh as hard as stone. There were so many people now that it seemed chaotic.
The buildings around them were not buildings at all. In fact, they were the jutting bones of Tiamat’s wings, reminders that the great organic spaceship had regrown her body from a seed. The structures had indentations and steps and hooded porches, but they had no doors or windows. These things had been grown over with bone, leaving just the ghost of a building that never was.
Grant indicated one of the lower buildings, where a run of steps jutted along its back wall. The steps ended midway up the wall, leaving a whole other story above them. The wall itself bent forward as if it might topple, and another nearby structure did the same, creating a narrow channel between the two at their closest points.
Grant was up the steps in an instant, with Rosalia following. She waited poised at the foot of the steps, keeping a sharp lookout for anybody who might spot them among the long shadows of the early-morning sun before she clambered up the steps after the ex-Mag.
Bolting to the top of the bone steps, Grant reached up with his free hand and grasped high on the wall where it met with the lip of the roof. Without slowing, he pulled himself up, his feet kicking out as he continued to move. In less than two seconds, Grant had flipped himself onto the roof, three stories above ground level. He crouched there, crab-walking to the far edge of the roof where he would have a better view of the massing army.
Rosalia followed a moment later. Her swift strides brought her up the pale steps at a run before springing toward the wall of the adjacent building and using it to kick herself higher and land on the rooftop with Grant, making just the bare minimum of noise. Keeping her head low, Rosalia hurried to join Grant at its edge.
Beyond the roof, they could see the quantum gateway hovering next to the Euphrates, its impossible depths churning with a swirl of beautiful colors. Grant and Rosalia watched in awe as Ullikummis turned to the people from the head of that vast column of loyal followers, raising his long, stone-clad arms. In a moment, the crowd fell to silence, two thousand or more people hushed without so much as a word. It was quite something to behold.
The stone giant stood on a hillock by the river, a raised mound of dirt beside the rippling surface. Brigid stood beside him, her red-gold hair shimmering with the sunlight, clutching the hand of the little girl in the indigo dress.
“Behold the tools of the future,” Ullikummis said, his voice carrying across the burgeoning group of arrivals. He indicated the dragon shape that stood behind him, its arrow-shaped head loom
ing high above, his voice echoing through the abandoned streets. “Here is Tiamat, the engine that will change the world. Here is your future, waiting to be freed from terrible bondage.
“Will you stand with me as I free Tiamat?”
The crowd cheered in response, hanging on Ullikummis’s every word.
“Will you embrace the future for the betterment of all?”
Again the crowd cheered.
“Onward, bearers of the future,” Ullikummis yelled, “onward to utopia.”
With that, the stone god turned and began to stride toward the outskirts of the dragon city, his tree-trunk-like feet stomping against the sandy soil in brutal, punishing blows. Brigid Haight strode with him, hurrying little Quav along at her side, the army of two thousand or more following briskly in their wake.
The people could not imagine how the wars of the Annunaki were to be fought. All they knew was what they saw: here was a leader who led, not a general who hid behind his troops as they went into battle.
Ullikummis spread out his hands, and the ground began to shake, a tremor running through it deep below the surface.
Holding his Sin Eater ready as he crouched atop of the chalk-white roof, Grant felt that tremor rock through his boots and against his knees, pounding deep through his body like a low bass note.
“The hell is that?” Grant muttered.
Before Rosalia could answer, something began to change beyond the edges of Tiamat’s broad wings. Those wings stretched out for eight miles, a huge structure that dominated the landscape. Now, around the outskirts, the ground rumbled and split as sharp prongs of stone were pulled from the soil, ripped from the bedrock itself to form a spiky cage around the perimeter of the spaceship. The prongs pointed into the air, their sharp tips climbing twelve feet into the sky like eerie monuments. More spikes tore through the ground as Ullikummis passed, and Grant watched as they spread out from where he was walking, new prongs jutting from the soil at an increasingly greater distance from where the stone god stepped.
“What is he doing?” Grant whispered.
“The same thing he did at Cerberus,” Rosalia replied. “Creating a lockdown.”
As she said it, the jutting columns began to dwindle, and those farthest from Ullikummis appeared much shorter, some just two or three feet in height. From their high vantage point, Grant and Rosalia could see that the pointed columns did not wrap around the whole of the grounded spaceship but instead ran in a crescent shape around this, the southwest quarter. Even so, the bowed line of spikes took in almost a mile in its length, a vast line of bars caging in the spaceship where she waited poised on the soil.
Behind the Cerberus warriors, the citylike form of Tiamat waited in silence, never acknowledging the barricade that had been erected before her. Though she looked like a city, the streets and buildings had been left vacant, a ghost town on the banks of the river. Every person who had stepped into the city had disappeared, abducted by its lone ruler, the Annunaki Overlord Enlil. But now Enlil was gone—wasn’t he?—and Ullikummis had arrived to take control of the genetic factory womb that Tiamat contained, his first bold step in reordering the world.
“We have to stop him,” Grant blurted, scrambling back toward the area of the rooftop that dropped to the staircase.
Rosalia grabbed his arm, pulling the ex-Mag up short. “Are you insane, Grant? There are probably two thousand people down there, maybe more. We can’t take them all on.”
Grant stared at her. “I don’t know a lot about all this stuff,” he said, “but I do know that when Tiamat’s involved, bad things happen.”
“I thought the ship was dead,” Rosalia stated angrily.
“If I’ve learned one thing about the Annunaki it’s this,” Grant told her grimly. “Things die only to be reborn. And when they come back, they come back worse than ever.
“We have to stop him.”
“Okay,” Rosalia agreed reluctantly. “Then we figure out a way. I’m not going out there with you, all guns blazing against a whole fucking army, hoping that’s somehow going to do the job.”
Grant nodded in agreement. “Always a way,” he said. “Just have to figure out what it is.”
Below them, the vast, ragtag army of Ullikummis stormed through the streets to the southwest of Tiamat’s skeletal structure, their chants echoing from the hard walls around them.
“We are stone,” they called. “Stone is strength.”
They reminded Rosalia of locusts, the way they swarmed across the wings of the fallen spaceship.
Chapter 5
The armies were massing elsewhere, too.
Halfway around the world, on the Pacific Coast of the old United States, Lakesh stood on the balcony of the temporary Cerberus base and sighed. Beside him, a beautiful samurai woman of petite stature waited for the Cerberus leader to take everything in.
The pair stood on the wooden balcony that ran right around the single-story structure, its steeple roofs and the railings of the balconies painted a bright, festive red. The woman was called Shizuka and she was the leader of the Tigers of Heaven, a position that placed many great responsibilities upon her shoulders. Dressed in the supple leather armor that she preferred, Shizuka was a warrior born, and she could outmatch any of the warriors in her team. She wore a katana sword in an ornate sheath at her belt, along with a shorter wakizashi blade nestled close to her back. Her black hair was cut in a long bob, the tips of which trailed down to brush her shoulders, and she had peach-tinted cheeks and rose-petal lips beneath the pleasing almond curves of her dark, attractive eyes.
The building where Cerberus had set up shop belonged to Shizuka, and it had been in her family for many generations. Surrounded by several acres of carefully manicured gardens, the building served as a lodge or winter palace, which her predecessors had visited for rest and relaxation. A tiny square garden stood at the rear of the property, dotted with winding paths and a simple water feature whose constant shushing sound added to the sense of tranquillity engendered by the flowering herbs that colored its carefully tended borders. Beyond that lay the vast lawns that stretched off toward the sea on one side and out to an untended private road at the other. A high wall ran along this side with a long, steel gate. Made up of a line of vertical bars painted the same red as the balcony, the gate stood more than eight feet in height and ran to a width of twelve, wide enough to let a vehicle like a Sandcat through. A simple sentry box stood to one side of the gate, located within the grounds themselves, where the operator could open the gate for visitors. The gate operated via an electromagnetic lock, which sealed it shut when not in use.
Out there, beyond the gate, Lakesh could see four men waiting. Pacing back and forth like caged tigers, the men wore heavy fustian robes like monks’ habits, the hoods pulled low to obscure their faces. Lakesh knew just who—or what—they were. Firewalkers, the agents of Ullikummis.
“Our jackals are getting closer,” Shizuka said, her tone betraying no emotion.
“Yes,” Lakesh agreed, staring at the gate through a set of binoculars. Behind him, Ryochi, the Tiger of Heaven warrior who had brought him to meet Shizuka, waited patiently, his pose as still as an ancient tree. “First there was one. Now four.”
“Six,” Shizuka corrected dispassionately. “Two are hiding in the foliage across the path. More will likely follow. Even now, we may assume that they are on their way.”
“How do they speak to one another?” Lakesh wondered aloud. “How are they communicating? I can’t see any radio equipment.”
“They each have the stone,” Shizuka reminded him. “Rosalia said it can identify sympathizers, other bearers of the stone seed. Maybe it acts as a communication device, too.”
Lakesh nodded wearily as he pulled the field glasses from his eyes. There was more to it than that, he felt sure. He had been present when pro-Ullikummis troops h
ad sacked the previous Cerberus base, and he had observed the way they acted in tandem. The Annunaki’s faithful warriors seemed to be linked at a cerebral level, often acting as one organism rather than many. The nearest equivalent he could think of was the way birds reacted in flight, turning together, responding as one majestic creature rather than as several. It was inhuman.
Lakesh wondered how long they would have to wait until the strangers were ready to mount their attack. Because he knew that they had to be here to attack. When it was just one of them he could believe that he might be here just to observe. But now—well, now an army was forming right outside his door.
Once again, Cerberus was about to be attacked. And even though he knew about it this time, Lakesh couldn’t help but wonder how well they would fare with none of his warriors left on site to repel intruders.
* * *
ON THE FORTRESS ISLE of Bensalem, Kane and Balam stared at the wreckage of the chrysalis strewed across the stone floor. A breeze blew through the open window at the far end of the room, playing through Kane’s unkempt hair as he worked out this latest puzzle.
“So, what?” Kane asked, his eyes fixed on the debris. “He changed Quav’s appearance? Ullikummis changed her appearance?”
Balam bent at the waist, sifting through the debris with his toe. “It’s hard to say,” he admitted. “The equipment—what’s left of it—fractured. It shouldn’t have done this, friend Kane. I’ve never known of this to happen before.”
“How many times you seen this setup, Balam?” Kane asked.
Balam shook his head heavily. “Not often,” he said. “The structures are Tuatha de Danaan, but it’s ancient technology reinterpreted. I barely recognize it.”
Kane took a pace forward, leaning down to look at the wreckage of the chrysalis. Then, still bent, he turned, looking directly up into Balam’s face. “Balam, we need to find her. To find them. So you have got to get that great big brain of yours in gear and figure out exactly what it is we have here, get me?”
