by James Axler
“No,” Rosalia said as she bounded from one rooftop to the next, making her way gradually back into the heart of the city. “Just get some ground between us for now. I have an idea.”
“Care to share it with the class?” Grant asked, irritated by the woman’s cryptic nature.
Rosalia’s dark eyes flashed as she glanced back at Grant. “Just keep up,” she said, and Grant watched as her trim figure launched across the gap between buildings, twirling through the air like a sycamore seed and allowing her to change direction as she landed.
The forming mob was long behind them, all but forgotten already. Even so, Grant couldn’t shake the feeling that they were trying to outrun the crest of a tidal wave.
* * *
ABOARD THE DRAGON SHIP, Tiamat, Enlil stood in the control room, studying the glasslike diagnostics displays as they filtered across the air, streaming into and through one another like so much smoke. Tiamat had been wounded in the conflict with the Cerberus people, and there had been significant damage to her water tanks which, in turn, had caused peripheral damage elsewhere. The ship was not full grown and, Enlil thought regretfully, he had perhaps been hasty in executing his plan to capture humans and work their primitive DNA into something suitable for use by the Annunaki.
Enlil held a palm computer in his clawed hand, mentally linked to his brain so that he could send commands to Tiamat at the speed of thought. Now he squeezed the device, which looked something like a seashell with a split center. Tiamat responded to that squeeze, adding a secondary layer of information across his yellow eyes with the vertical, black-slit pupils. She was hurt and her body was deteriorating. She had within her the power to regenerate, but she could not tap it. Something was obstructing her functionality, something relating to the damage she had sustained the night before.
Enlil cursed as another lightning strike rattled the mighty ship from the abandoned birthing chamber. The machinery there was going haywire thanks to the combined efforts of several Cerberus operatives. Damn them—did they have to insist on interfering in his plans time and again?
As Enlil studied the internal diagnostics, an alert flashed across one of the mistlike displays that hung in the air like smoke rings. He studied it for a moment, trying to make sense of the information being relayed to him. There were people outside, an army of apekin, hurrying through the dead corpuscles of Tiamat’s dry wings. Could this be Cerberus once more, sending a thousand or more of their people to attack him? Did they have a thousand people?
But there was something else in the display that caught Enlil’s eye, and he enlarged the image so as better to study it. Another Annunaki was out there, heading toward the heart of Tiamat among the apekin throng. The mother ship had detected his presence immediately, identified him as one of her children.
Enlil studied the scan for a long moment, taking in the information it provided about that genetically altered Annunaki. Not Marduk, then, or Overlord Zu. Another, one who had altered his perfect Annunaki body for reasons that Enlil could not begin to guess. And then the realization struck him as the monitors droned on, pulling up a graphic representation of that Annunaki stranger who hurried toward Enlil’s lair.
“Ullikummis,” Enlil muttered, the words lost in the sharp intake of his breath. “So, you have returned, my son.”
It should have been impossible, Enlil knew. He had expelled the child into space, sent him to float among the stars for the duration of his near-endless life. And yet, here he stood on Earth once again and with an army of apekin at his beck and call.
But Enlil did not question the facts presented to him. Ullikummis had beaten the odds and returned, and that was only right because he was his son—and what would any son of Enlil be if he could not defy the odds?
Tapping a quick sequence out on the palm link to Tiamat, Enlil called forth the Igigi who hid within the shells of the reborn Annunaki. “We still have much to do,” he spoke to the empty room as if reminding himself. “More than I conceived. Let us begin.”
Tiamat trembled as her mighty cargo doors opened for the very first time.
* * *
THE SOUNDS OF THE MOB were behind them now, their distant echoes like a half-remembered dream. Grant and Rosalia made their way through the citylike structure of the grounded spaceship via rooftops, leaping from one level to the next, turning back only occasionally when they ran out of routes. Rosalia had a natural talent for this, Grant noticed, and—not for the first time—he wondered momentarily about the mysterious young woman’s background. Her movements and abilities spoke of long hours of training via repetition, and she seemed competent in a great many disciplines. Perhaps, he thought, her training mirrored a Magistrate’s. Perhaps she was an ex-Magistrate herself.
Grant and Rosalia had traveled through this so-called city once before, just a half day earlier. It had taken time to navigate the labyrinthine roads then, constantly meeting dead ends as the streets snaked back on themselves like rats’ tails. The rooftops proved a far quicker way across the settlement, something Grant had not considered before, having assumed—incorrectly as it transpired—that the structures were inhabited.
They stopped at one point on the roof of a three-story structure, now far distant from the burgeoning hordes of Ullikummis’s army. Rosalia stood bent over, palms on her knees as she sucked in great breaths through her open mouth.
“You okay?” Grant asked.
From her bent position, Rosalia glanced up and gave a fixed smile. “Little run...never hurt anyone,” she said between breaths. Grant watched as her slender shoulders heaved.
His own cardiovascular system was burning with effort, but Grant steadied his breathing and watched the far distance, searching for the city limits. Prongs of dark stone had appeared there, like thick lines of ink amid the whiteness of the spaceship’s bone structures. Ullikummis was bringing them, just as he had guessed, tearing up the streets as he set his markers, each one blocking off yet another route of the mazelike city.
With casual indifference, Grant recalled the Sin Eater to his hand once again, then checked it over with studied professionalism. He emptied the dead magazine in its stock, reloading with a fresh magazine from his belt before sending it back to its hiding place in his sleeve. He was running low on ammo now—best be careful how he used it.
When he turned back he saw Rosalia looking at him. No, not at him—past him. Grant turned to peer behind him, saw what it was that had caught her eye. Another needle of dark stone was wending its way into the sky like a single nail, emerging between the chalk-white buildings perhaps a quarter-mile away, scraping against their walls.
“He’s moving in,” Rosalia said.
“Yeah,” Grant agreed. “Adding a few personal touches, I guess, to make the place seem more homey.”
They continued on, heading toward their goal of the dragon’s torso at the center of the weird settlement. Grant led the way, picking up speed as he hurried across the rooftops, and he was gratified to see Rosalia keeping pace with him. Her endurance was exceptional, and he had never once heard her complain.
They leaped from the edge of the roof and onto the next, this one just eighteen inches from their launch point where the structures of the city bent inward against one another, vying for space like teeth in a crooked jaw.
While the massing army crowded the twisty-turny streets far behind them, Grant and Rosalia made good progress. Despite a couple of missteps, the two Cerberus rebels found themselves close to the city center in a little over ten minutes. They stood atop a two-story structure, its walls bone-white like everything else around them. The sun had risen, and the brightness of the bone-cobbled streets and buildings was dazzling. There, just two blocks ahead, loomed the great saurian body of the dragon, its head thrust toward the heavens with the inscrutable lizard smile formed along the line of its pressed lips.
“Once we pass her, we
can exit town to the north,” Rosalia said, but Grant was thinking about other strategies.
Grant looked at Tiamat up close once more, his head reeling to take in the immensity of her body. This was a space vehicle that served as a city, and its head alone would have covered a city block.
They had come toward Tiamat via a somewhat circuitous route, and they now stood closer to its left rump than they had previously. Standing beside Grant on the bone rooftop catching her breath, Rosalia eyed the body of the dragon with awe. The scales of its flesh were dark as if smoke-damaged, the color lost to the shadows cast by the morning sun. There were lights within the structure, glistening in the shadows like pinprick stars, their true size lost amid the grandeur of the dragon form itself.
“She’s kind of beautiful, I guess,” Rosalia admitted.
“Yeah,” Grant agreed. “Tiamat. Mother of the gods.”
Tiamat’s skin was mottled, and as their eyes adjusted to the darkness of the shadows Grant and Rosalia began to notice where that skin was damaged, great rents in the flesh where it had spoiled like an overripe fruit. Tiamat had not been fully formed when they had mounted their attack the previous night, and the damage they had caused—despite being relatively minor—had spread through the structure, ripping away great hunks of her flesh.
The last time, they had gained entry via a series of explosive charges strapped to the spaceship’s hull, carving a small hole just big enough to allow a person entry, but that hole was a quarter turnaround from where they were now, Grant guessed, and on a structure the size of Tiamat it would take some time to find it again.
As Grant pondered this, Rosalia pointed to something at the very rear of the structure, beneath the base of its huge tail.
“Magistrate, look.”
Grant saw a straight line of light forming there, and as he watched the line became a rectangle, moving downward as it increased in size. A door was opening there, he realized, colossal in size and wide enough to allow thirty Sandcats to drive into it abreast. An easy way in or out.
“This ain’t good,” Grant muttered.
Then he stopped, the words turning to ashes in his mouth. Within that huge line of light, Grant and Rosalia could see humanoid figures, backlit shadows that waited in line at the edge of the hangar door. Despite the harsh light streaming from behind them, Grant recognized their silhouettes.
“We have a new problem,” Grant stated.
They were Annunaki—hundreds of them.
Chapter 7
Brewster Philboyd hadn’t been kidding when he had told Kudo that he might be the one who came to collect him from the field. Right now the gangly limbed astrophysicist was hurrying across the carefully manicured lawn that surrounded the south stretch of Shizuka’s coastal property that he and his team had taken over as their temporary headquarters, making his way to the spot that served as a parallax point. The lanky scientist carried a metallic attaché case in one hand, swinging it to and fro as he rushed across the green lawn. The case contained an interphaser unit, one of two currently in use by the Cerberus personnel. Grant’s team had gone into the field via a different method, leaving Cerberus with both units until Kane took one to respond to Balam’s call.
Several hundred yards from the back windows of the temporary ops room, Brewster halted, checking the area he now stood in.
“Are you in place yet, Brewster?” Donald Bry asked via their linked Commtacts.
Brewster gazed around at the largely unremarkable stretch of lawn. Over to one side he could see the simple wooden fence that ran along the cliff’s edge like a farmyard gate, beyond which was a sheer drop into the Pacific Ocean. “I believe so,” he stated into his throat mike.
“Domi’s showing at about a quarter mile from the pickup point and moving fast,” Donald informed him, relaying the information he saw on screen just a few hundred yards away.
Brewster nodded. “Check.” He was busy now, working at the locks of the bulky attaché case and pulling the triangular interphaser unit free from its protective housing. In a few seconds Brewster had the unit set up on the ground, the case closed and locked beside it. His fingers briskly tapped out a sequence of information on the flip-down control panel at the interphaser’s base, waiting while the interphaser went through its self-diagnosis.
There was nothing to distinguish this part of the lawn from any other, other than perhaps the fact that the grass looked a little patchy where people had walked across it, like the baseline of a grass tennis court. The interphaser required a parallax point to operate, but these came in many different forms. Frequently, parallax points were centers of worship or held great religious significance, but so much information had been lost that it was quite possible that any sign of a point’s existence had become buried under centuries of changing terrain. Whatever this point had originally looked like, it was now just another strip of the neatly manicured lawn of Shizuka’s property. The nukecaust had affected the old California coast, which meant that this coastal property had probably been much farther inland a few hundred years before, just another grand estate in the Hollywood hills.
As he thought on that, the interphaser came to life and Brewster stepped back as the eerily beautiful flower of energy opened up before his eyes, twin cones of churning color lunging above and—impossibly—below where the interphaser waited. In another second, the quantum gateway was open, joining this space to one thousands of miles away in the midst of old Iraq. Brewster girded himself before stepping through, feeling that discomforting sense of nonmovement wash over him in a surging rush.
* * *
“IMPOSSIBLE,” ROSALIA spit as she watched the lizardlike Annunaki forms step from the lit rear doors of the dragon ship Tiamat.
Crouched beside her on the rooftop, Grant didn’t bother to answer.
“The ship was falling apart...” Rosalia continued, doing nothing to disguise the irritation in her voice.
“It still is,” Grant told her in a monotone.
Rosalia looked to where he indicated, saw the blotches of discolored—what was it, flesh, skin?—that showed all along the hull where there had not been any before.
“Those creatures are being controlled by something,” Rosalia said, turning her attention back to the hundred or so Annunaki who were now swarming from the lowered deck plate that formed the back of the door. “I don’t know what it is, Grant, but it came out of my dog. I—” she shook her head, trying to vocalize something at the very farthest reaches of plausibility “— felt it.”
“I don’t think they’re friendly,” Grant said.
“They saved us before. Saved you,” Rosalia reminded him.
“No, they didn’t.” Grant shook his head. “They wanted Enlil—they made that pretty darn clear. We just happened to be along for the ride. Once they had what they wanted, they dismissed us from their thoughts. My guess is that now they’ve dealt with the big bad, they’ll come after anything and anyone who gets in their way.”
“You’re speculating,” Rosalia cautioned him.
“We need to get inside the ship,” Grant announced, ignoring her complaints. “Now more than ever, we need to shut this baby down once and for all. Before Ullikummis gets there or these reborn things strip the ship of whatever it is they want.”
* * *
LOCKED INSIDE THE ANNUNAKI bodies, the Igigi felt joyous as they hurried into the bone streets of the dragon. For more than three thousand years, they had been locked in a prison of their own devising, their memories trapped in the corrupted shadow box. Now they had bodies once again, the powerful bodies of the Annunaki, and they reveled in their use.
That they served Enlil, the mightiest and cruelest of Annunaki royalty, seemed only fitting; they had served him in their first life, when they had been “those who watch and see,” organizing the world to his requirements and enforcing his will. To
serve the Annunaki was an honor, and it was all that the Igigi had ever wanted, all that they had lived for. Their quest of rebellion, three-and-a-half millennia ago, was but a momentary lapse in a race of creatures bred only for servitude.
Now more than one hundred of them flooded out of the hull doors of the starship Tiamat, rushing into the maze of streets beyond. Their Annunaki bodies were powerful, perfect specimens of the grace and superiority of their masters in all things. To wear those flesh suits was an honor like no other, and each Igigi gloried in what he or she had become.
Around them, the bone-white buildings glimmered beneath the morning sun, a swathe of alabaster that seemed to stand as a monument to the might and wonderment of the Annunaki, like the old cities of Eridu and Nippur and Babylon that had sat on this very soil just a few thousand years before. The Annunaki forms hurried through the streets, their pace never slacking, things of beauty carved of flesh and scale and life. Ullikummis’s army had entered from the east, and they, too, dashed through the streets, their numbers more than three thousand now and swelling with each pulse of the interphase window on the banks of the Euphrates. That these two forces would meet—one of one hundred or so, the other outnumbering them by thirty to one—was inevitable. The first clashes occurred less than a mile and a half from the center, where Tiamat’s body basked in the sunshine.
The human army turned another corner in the twisted streets and came face-to-face with three Annunaki. There were almost two dozen in the human party, and though they were armed with simple weapons, they felt confident that they could overpower these few humanoid creatures whose scales shimmered in the light.
“Kill them!” shouted the lead human, a man in his late twenties with a swish of black hair that was going prematurely gray at the temples.
