by James Axler
“Kane, I know that you are worried about Brigid—” Balam began but Kane halted him with a single gesture of irritation.
“Just figure it out,” he instructed. “Get your hands dirty, for once, and get as much information as you can.” Then, to Balam’s surprise, Kane grasped a handful of his tunic and shoved him forward, pushing the bulbous-headed humanoid closer to the ruined chrysalis.
Balam staggered forward, his feet tromping over the broken fragments that were arrayed across the stone flagging. “Respectfully, friend Kane,” he said, “I am ill prepared to make a full analysis.”
Kane tamped down the rage that was welling inside him, reminding himself that Balam had little experience in the field like this. The two of them had been thrown together by circumstance, with Balam essentially a peaceful arbiter and Kane currently at his lowest physical and mental ebb. Yet here they stood, on the trail of a woman Kane considered close enough to be his sister and a child whom Balam had taken for his own. Kane was being too hard on him, he knew. Balam was hurt, emotionally drained. He put up a front, as he always did, reticent to share his emotions. But he had lost his foster daughter, a girl with whom he’d been in the solitary company of for almost three years, and his feelings had to be in turmoil right now.
Balam looked up from the ruined shell. “It broke on usage,” he stated simply. “Which means it was imperfect. A prototype, perhaps.”
“It’s possible, I guess,” Kane mused uncertainly.
“If you build something that fails,” Balam reasoned, “you either improve upon it or you resign yourself to defeat. I do not believe that Ullikummis would resign himself to defeat.”
“No,” Kane agreed. “That’s not his way. Let’s look around some more.”
Without much enthusiasm, Kane and Balam left the room and began checking the other doorways along the tunnellike corridor, each one of them open. There were wide areas of solid wall between each doorway, and Kane wondered whether more rooms might be hidden in this structure, built as it had been by Ullikummis.
The next room was empty, as was the one after, nothing but dust blowing about in the sea breeze from the open windows. No provision had been made to insulate this rock palace. Presumably it had been designed by Ullikummis for his own usage and as such there was no need, for his genetically altered body could survive in the cold vacuum of space.
The fourth doorway on the right-hand wall opened into a small chamber that stank of something rotting. Kane peered inside, but he stepped back instantly as something leaped at him, hissing like a snake as it threw itself through the air. There were bars there, narrow jabs of rock stretched horizontally across a recess behind the doorway like a venetian blind. The thing in the room slammed against these bars, reaching through them with its tiny hands as it tried to grasp Kane’s shirt.
Standing away from the doorway, Kane stared at it, reeling in horror at the thing. It stood two feet tall, human in shape but deformed, with a blur of face as if its head had been melted. There was anger in its wide-spaced blue eyes—anger and perhaps sorrow. The thing was naked, female, with skin a pink so pale that it was almost white. Around her, watery feces stained the stone floor, creating the stench. The girl hissed again, rattling the bars of her cell. She was bony, wasting away, her ribs running like the keys of a piano against the pale skin of her chest. She couldn’t get through the bars, Kane realized—the first “door” he had seen here—and he moved closer once more, studying the strange figure.
“It’s okay,” Kane soothed. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
The creature behind the bars watched him with feral eyes, hissing again as he stood there before her. At first glance the girl appeared hairless, but now Kane could see a few tufts of white along her scalp as he took a closer look. Her skin was puckered here and there, running like fish scales along the sides of her legs and around her throat. It reminded Kane of the Annunaki, and he realized in a moment what he was looking at.
“Have you found something?” Balam asked from behind him, disturbing Kane’s thoughts.
The Cerberus warrior turned to Balam, a hard look on his face. “You don’t want to see this, Balam,” he said.
Less than a year earlier, Kane might have teased Balam about the thing in the cell, taking a childish pleasure in shocking friends like his colleagues in the Cerberus group. Something had changed inside him over these past few months, something that had dulled his happy-go-lucky streak, making him more ponderous, more introspective. The thing in the cell was Little Quav, he realized, or some approximation of her.
* * *
AT THE TEMPORARY Cerberus headquarters on the Pacific Coast, three operatives sat in heated discussion about another problem related to Ullikummis. The room itself was a small study with a desk along one wall where a portable computer screen glowed, and several comfy chairs that had been placed in such a way as to be behind the desk user’s back when people sat in them. The man at the desk had turned his swivel chair to face the two women, both of whom were dressed in the white jumpsuits with blue vertical zippers that served as the uniform of the Cerberus personnel.
“Could focused ultrasound actually break down rock?” Reba DeFore asked with irritation in her tone. She was a stocky bronze-skinned woman with brown eyes and ash-blond hair tied up in an elaborate braid. She appeared tired and haunted, dark shadows massing around her eyes. It had been a trying couple of months for DeFore, once the on-site physician for the Cerberus redoubt.
From the desk, Dr. Kazuka shook his head uncertainly and he peered back to the screen of his electronic notebook. “There’s a lot of theory dating back to before the nukecaust,” he stated, “but I can find little in the way of evidence of its practical application.” In his early forties, Kazuko had cropped black hair and the walnut complexion of his fellow Tigers of Heaven, for whom he was a field medic. He had been seconded by Shizuka to serve the Cerberus team in this, their hour of need. He wore a light cotton shirt, open at the collar, with cotton slacks and soft shoes, and he moved with a simple grace that was unusual in a man. Despite his light ensemble, Kazuka was sweating; the room was small and the three bodies within were making it warm.
The third person, another operative for Cerberus called Mariah Falk, rubbed at her leg irritably. She was a slender woman in her forties, with dark hair pebbled with streaks of gray. Though not conventionally attractive, Mariah had a winning smile and an amiable manner that put people at ease. Falk was a geologist and, unusually, her expertise had been called upon in this medical problem because it involved one of the obedience stones that had been planted by Ullikummis. She had a personal beef with Ullikummis—not only had he killed her would-be boyfriend, but he had also caused her to be shot in the leg just a few months before. Whenever the discussion turned to Ullikummis, Mariah remembered Clem Bryant’s face as he lay dying on the floor of the Cerberus cafeteria, and she felt the determination well up within her.
“The physics behind it seems sound enough,” Mariah said, wincing at her own accidental pun. “Seismic waves have been used for oceanographic studies, but really you’d want to ask Clem about th—” She stopped herself, realizing her error.
Reba reached over, placing her thin hand on Mariah’s for a few seconds, patting her gently. “It’s okay, Mariah.”
Mariah thanked her, silently mouthing the word before she continued. “Point is, it’s possible,” she
concluded. “But I’m talking in terms of rocks, not people. Employing focused ultrasound for surgery is a long way out of my league.”
Reba and Kazuka nodded, grateful for the geologist’s input.
“The real question, it seems to me,” Kazuka said in his compassionate tone, “is what other options do we have left open to us. Your operative Edwards has this sentient stone growing inside his skull like a tumor, and it is affecting his judgment and ability to function.”
It had done
more than that, in fact. Edwards had been turned against his teammates by the obedience stone, and he was acting on external instructions to achieve the goals of his new master, Ullikummis. And he wasn’t the only one—other members of the Cerberus team who had once been trusted had now gone rogue, working for the New Order in Ullikummis’s name. Sela Sinclair and Brigid Baptiste were two such operatives, and there had been at least four others identified whose thoughts had been infiltrated. It was a dark day for Cerberus when they realized friends had been turned into enemies.
“Utilizing ultrasound is a noninvasive form of surgery,” Kazuka continued thoughtfully. “We can use it to break down the stone without making an incision and thus avoid causing damage to the brain. This would seem to be desirable.”
“Although we remain uncertain how much this thing has infiltrated Edwards’s brain itself,” DeFore reminded them both.
“We cannot really ever know that unless we cut Edwards open,” Kazuka said. “Something we are loath to do for obvious reasons.”
When DeFore saw the confusion in Mariah’s face she added quietly, “He’d die.”
“At the end of the twentieth century,” Kazuka summarized from the computer screen, “this type of surgery was being explored as an alternative to radiation treatments for cancer. The precision of the technique—if applied correctly—is its strength.”
The room fell silent for a moment as the three highly educated people considered the moral dilemma they faced.
“You just need to make a decision, don’t you?” Mariah said.
“I don’t like it,” DeFore said. “We run the risk of permanently scrambling Edwards’s brain, turning him into a vegetable or worse, killing him.” She turned to Kazuka.
“Better to act than to do nothing,” Kazuka said. “I vote yes, we perform the surgery.”
The two doctors turned to Mariah.
“You have the deciding vote, Mariah,” DeFore said gently.
“No,” Mariah said. “I’m not a doctor. You guys should—” She stopped when she saw the haunted look in DeFore’s eyes. She remembered Clem lying there, his skull crushed, remembered what had happened to her in Tenth City, when she had been shot in the leg to save her from killing herself by walking into the flames of a crematorium on the instructions of Ullikummis, whose brutal words had seemed to pierce her very skull. She took a deep breath, forcing the welling emotions aside.
“When Ullikummis first landed,” Mariah began, “I had his thoughts forced on me, overlaying my own. I imagine it was a lot like the way the obedience stone is affecting Edwards, a prototype, if you will.
“I remember how that felt,” Mariah continued solemnly, “the way it felt to have my own thoughts
obliterated by the thoughts of someone else. Something alien. So, I vote yes to the surgery, because if it does kill Edwards—who is my respected colleague and my friend—then death wouldn’t be so bad. Death would be a release.”
The two doctors nodded, accepting Mariah’s impassioned speech. They would operate. Mariah—a geologist and not a medical doctor—only hoped she had made the right decision, because it was one she would have to live with for the rest of her life.
* * *
“WHAT IS IT?” BALAM ASKED.
“Tell me, Balam,” Kane said, avoiding the question, “can the Annunaki clone living things? Humans, say, or hybrids?”
“Their bodies are clone bodies,” Balam said with that superior logic he often employed. “When you met with Enlil and his brethren, you were not looking on the same flesh that walked this planet thousands of years ago. You merely looked at things reborn, perfect copies. Clones by another name.”
Kane stepped aside, letting Balam see into the cell for the first time. “I think he cloned her, or tried to,” he warned.
Balam looked at the thing in the cell, and his face became a stony mask. “Scales,” was all he said.
Kane looked back at the girl in the cell, aware now that his heart was drumming a tarantella against his chest. He willed it to slow, recalling the breathing exercises he had been taught when he had trained as a Magistrate in Cobaltville. The thing in the cell stared at him plaintively before baring her teeth and hissing once again. The teeth were thin and sharp like needles, and they faced inward, cutting into her mouth.
Quav.
Balam was nodding, as if reading Kane’s thoughts. The thing in the cell was his foster daughter, or at least an approximation of her based on a flawed genetic template. She had been changed, twisted, turned into the Annunaki form she might one day blossom into.
Balam reached through the stony bars of the cell, the six long fingers of his hand shaking just slightly as he went to touch the girl.
The girl-thing in the cell hissed, flinging her hands at Balam’s, the talons of her fingers sweeping across the cell bars to rip into his pale flesh. Balam pulled his hand away in surprise, whispering Quav’s name sorrowfully as he did so. There was no recognition in the girl’s uneven eyes, just hate. She was an animal.
Balam stood in the tunnellike corridor, staring at the cell door with his wide, expressive eyes. He was shaking, Kane saw, just a slight quiver to his shoulders. “A clone,” he confirmed, reading the thing’s mind.
“Balam,” Kane said slowly, “I want you to step away. Go back down the corridor and wait for me.”
“Kane, I see no sense in that,” Balam replied. “I am well able to cope with—”
“Just go down the corridor,” Kane cut him off.
Wary of further argument, Balam stepped back, making his way to the far end of the corridor. Beside the cell, Kane brought his right hand up, pointing it toward the thing grasping at him through the narrow stone bars. With a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons, the Sin Eater appeared in Kane’s hand for just a second, launching from its hidden wrist holster and striking his palm comfortably, its guardless trigger meeting with Kane’s crooked index finger. A short burst of fire erupted from the muzzle of the gun, filling the corridor for just a moment with the cacophony of gunfire. Then the weapon had returned to its hiding place, and Kane came walking back down the corridor toward Balam.
At the far end of the corridor, Balam eyed Kane with a faint appreciation. “You killed her. There was no need to do that,” he said.
“Yes, there was,” Kane told him, his mouth a grim line across his tired face. “There may be more of these things, stillborn clones created to emulate Little Quav. No good can possibly come of cloning her.”
“I do not believe he was cloning her,” Balam said. “I suspect he was testing the limits of her endurance. That thing had Annunaki traits, as well as hybrid ones. He is looking to catalyze the change.”
“Test subjects, then.” Kane nodded. “We should stop that.”
“Kane, the chrysalis wasn’t to grow Quav,” Balam said. “It was to test her cells. Ullikummis must be planning to bring forth his mother, Ninlil, from her genetic template. But to do that would require a genetic factory—it would require Tiamat.”
“Tiamat’s gone,” Kane dismissed. “I saw it with my own eyes. She blew up in the outer atmosphere.”
“Things Annunaki seldom die entirely,” Balam warned.
Kane was thinking faster now, beginning to see the angles involved. “But if Tiamat is alive, then how do we find her? She’s a spaceship and space is pretty big.”
“We can use the chair,” Balam stated simply.
Chapter 6
“Where are we, Brigly?” Little Quav asked. She was looking up to Brigid Haight’s ocean-colored eyes as they marched past the pillars of rock that Ullikummis had placed to cordon off the city. All around them, the army of Ullikummis grew from the impossible reaches of the swirling quantum portal, swarming into the deserted city of the dragon.
Brigid flicked her gaze down to take in the girl properly, seeing her sw
eet face looking up at her with that strange blend of curiosity and hope in her pale eyes. Brigid had been thinking about the colors hidden in the interphase jump, the sky blue with its golden swirls like lightning, the flecks of green and red hidden in its depths. For a moment, she could see that pattern as if it had been burned into her memory, could feel the serenity those colors seemed to bring. In that moment, she didn’t know hate. In that moment, she was not Haight at all.
“What is it, child?” Brigid asked, recovering herself to the here, to the now.
“Where are we, Brigly?” Quav asked once more, looking around her as Ullikummis’s troops hurried past on their way to the dragon’s torso at the core of the dead city.
Brigid reached down with her free hand, running it gently through Little Quav’s downy hair. “You’re almost home, darling,” she said. “Almost home.”
* * *
FROM ATOP the pale-colored rooftop in the city, Grant and Rosalia watched Ullikummis’s loyal troops swarm into the streets of bone. Grant looked to where the great dragon head loomed above the buildings, waiting emotionlessly in the center of the strange structure. They were perhaps five miles from that central hull, but the pathways to it were labyrinthine, following the addling design of the corpuscles that should flood through the great dragon’s wings. The wings themselves stretched as mighty crescents along the banks of the Euphrates, two great quarter moons poised and ready to take flight.
“So, Magistrate, what are we going to do?” Rosalia asked, as just below them hundreds of troops surged in from the city limits.
“Ullikummis will section off the city,” Grant said, extrapolating from what he had just seen. “Close in on the center where Enlil is housed.
“Of course, he doesn’t know Enlil’s down for the count,” the ex-Mag added sourly. “Ironically, that might have been the one thing that would stop him. I wouldn’t have placed a wager on who would win in a fight between Enlil and Ullikummis.”
