by James Axler
Kudo nodded. “Philboyd, I am most gratified to see you. It has been one very long day.”
“Twenty-four hours,” Philboyd said agreeably as he led Kudo through the maze of open corridors to where he had set up the interphaser.
As they walked, Brewster inquired as to Domi’s health, and Kudo assured him she hadn’t stirred and that, as far as he could tell, nothing was broken.
The interphase unit waited on a wide stone tablet brushed with sand, its triangular sides glistening in the sunlight.
“How long were you waiting?” Kudo asked.
“Got here about twenty minutes ago,” Brewster said. “Took a little look around while I was waiting. Place is utterly dead, thank goodness. Don’t know what I’d have done if it hadn’t been.”
One of the fundamental problems with teleportation was that one could never quite be sure into which circumstances one would emerge. Since teleportation worked instantaneously, it required a sharp mind to react to whatever scenario one might face. As a rule, Brewster preferred to monitor things from the safety of his own desk.
“Still,” Brewster said as he tapped in the code to send them home, “at least we know where we’ll be jumping this time. Straight home and don’t spare the horses, am I right?”
Brewster pulled his hand back as the control panel at the base of the interphaser came to life, and the two men watched as the eerie cones of light opened above and below the metal pyramid like a lotus blossom, witchfire flashing within their churning depths. A moment later, Brewster and Kudo—with Domi’s unconscious form slung over the latter’s shoulder—stepped into that spectrum of patterned light and disappeared.
* * *
AT THE SAME MOMENT, identical twin cones of light seemed to emerge from nowhere, forming with the abruptness of a monsoon on a spot on the carefully manicured lawn of a villa overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Brewster breathed a sigh of relief as he and Kudo stepped out of the chaotic swirl of light, back on home ground once more. But as they turned to return to the single-story lodge that served as the temporary base for the Cerberus operation, they saw dark smoke billowing from its walls and heard sounds of gunfire. Cerberus was under attack.
Chapter 8
When Kane stepped into the quantum gateway of the interphaser with Balam, it had been like stepping into water. It seemed to splash all around him with that familiar shush-shushing of the ocean as breakers raced up the beach, the smell of brine piercing his thoughts.
Opening his eyes, Kane looked down and saw the spume of the sea lash against his feet once again. Gulls cawed overhead, their voices sounding as if they were berating one another. Kane watched as his foot left another great indentation in the soft sand, watched as the ocean’s edge hurried up the beach to cover it, filling in the damage with its clear waters.
He was no longer Kane, he realized. He was Ullikummis, the stone feet leaving long indentations in the shining wet sand. He peered up, that sense of disorientation passing in a moment as he realized he had somehow switched bodies, delving into the memories of the stone implant that he wore like a scar across his face. Overlord Enlil was waiting up ahead on a bluff, and beside him stood Ningishzidda, the genetic engineer who had created Ullikummis’s body. Shorter than Enlil, Ningishzidda’s scales were jade-green and he wore lenses over his eyes, each one operating on a mechanical arm that could be lowered in place to increase the magnification of whatever he studied. Both Annunaki squinted against the rich afternoon sunlight, their cloaks catching in the wind.
“Come now, Ullikummis,” Ningishzidda called, his voice duotonal. “The experiment begins.”
* * *
AUTOMATICALLY, Kane-Ullikummis hurried across the beach and up the bluff where his father and the
gengineer waited, clambering up the slope in great, loping strides. His body still felt new, and the legs ached with each movement. As part of the ongoing experiment to make him the perfect assassin, Ullikummis had had his legs stretched, and the pins holding them in place burned and throbbed as he moved his muscles.
Dispassionately, Enlil looked at his son as he reached the top of the cliff. His father gave little of himself, and his mother had once described him to the young child as “one who only knows how to take, never to give.” At thirteen years old, Ullikummis failed to really understand what she meant. He saw his handsome father presiding over the golden city of Nippur and he idolized him while others worshipped this so-called god from space.
“Your hands,” Ningishzidda prompted.
Ullikummis held them straight before him, pressing the wrists together as shown while Ningishzidda produced the binding wire. The wire was made of spun silver, and it twinkled in the sun’s rays like a sliver of stolen moonlight. In a moment, Ullikummis’s hands were bound before him, and he watched emotionlessly as Ningishzidda kneeled to bind his ankles.
“There is a possibility that the prince will not survive this,” Ningishzidda said, addressing Lord Enlil.
“Then he will have been a disappointment,” Enlil replied, gazing out over the caroming waves of the ocean.
They did this often, talked about Ullikummis in his presence as if he was not there, as if he were just an object, a thing. He was seven feet tall now, as tall as either lord, yet he felt dwarfed in their company, these great figures who ran the world.
“How did the water feel?” Ningishzidda asked Ullikummis.
“Warm, sir,” Ullikummis replied, “I think.”
It was hard to be sure. Ullikummis was a genetic freak now, his skin grown over by the stone cladding for which he would become known. Under the instruction of Enlil, the gengineer had altered Ullikummis at a basic level, retooling him since before birth. The building blocks had been injected into Ullikummis when he was but an egg grown from Ninlil’s womb. Over the following thirteen years, Ningishzidda had activated each of the changes he had planted within Ullikummis’s DNA, encouraging the child to grow in a certain manner in the way that a master horticulturalist will tend to a rosebush to shape it in a certain way. In essence, the genetic engineer had created this freak, this monster that stood apart from the rest of the Annunaki pantheon, feared and loathed in equal measure.
The strips tight, Ullikummis waddled to the cliff’s edge, peering down at the rolling waves crashing against its side twenty feet below.
“The drop is not very far, Ullikummis,” Ningishzidda reminded him. “Take a breath before you hit the water.”
“Yes, sir...” Ullikummis began to reply, but before the second word had left his lips, Enlil struck him between the shoulder blades, driving the breath from his lungs and pushing him over the edge of the cliff. The great stone creature toppled like a pillar, falling over himself as he hurtled toward the waiting ocean. His chest hurt from the forceful blow he had been struck, and he gasped only the shallowest of breaths before he hit the surface, dropping beneath like a thrown spear.
He had no breath. He was beneath the water, and he had no breath. Ullikummis watched as the last few bubbles escaped from his mouth, racing upward and away even as he plummeted toward the ocean’s bed.
It didn’t matter. Ningishzidda had built things into his biological makeup that would allow him to survive for a while without breath—perhaps indefinitely. His teacher, Upelluri, had shown him breathing exercises, ways to slow his breathing and his need for oxygen. He slipped into the trancelike state immediately, stilling his mind and letting the water surge past him.
Warm where the sun touched it, the water was cooler as soon as he dropped away from its surface. Ullikummis dropped quickly, his body straight, arms and legs tied, falling like the proverbial stone. His body was covered by stone armor, he weighed more than six normal Annunaki of his size and he was still growing.
He opened his eyes, two yellow orbs, each one split with a vertical black line. They were lizard’s eyes, the eyes of the Annunaki. In
time, Ningishzidda would replace them, too, but for now they would suffice. They felt hard against the water, as if they wanted to pop out of his skull or to burst. Ullikummis saw the darkness increase around him as he fell farther away from the surface and peered above to see the dwindling light that swirled there in a series of broken white stripes.
Ullikummis was struck by how different things were down here. Broadly speaking, Earth was two environments—the land and the water. Things of the land relied on air to live, and they hurried to and fro on legs or wings or the bottom of their bellies as they tried to keep up with those molecules of oxygen buzzing all about them. Down here, in the water, things ran at a slower pace. The creatures moved with grace, and the plants waited for time to pass, doing little to attract others to them in that desperate struggle to reproduce and spread their seeds. The revelation struck Ullikummis with such obviousness that he almost kicked himself—in holding his breath he could work slower down here, too, no longer dancing to the urgent drumbeat of the surface world. A smile played across the stony crags of his face as the teenager settled down to the task at hand, no longer hurried by the pace set by those around him.
An air breather could drown in an inch of water as easily as he could drown in an ocean. Thus, the depth mattered little to Ullikummis, and the pressure of the ocean was just a minor irritation on his powerful body as he worked slowly at his bonds.
It took three days before he emerged from the ocean, the bonds removed, a way located back to the surface. Kane had been with him the whole time, reliving the memory like an old video film, experiencing every second of those days, Ullikummis’s thoughts now his own.
Ningishzidda had been gratified to see Ullikummis step into the banqueting hall in Nippur, welcoming the lad as one might welcome a dog one thought had run away from home. Enlil was less fervent, acknowledging the boy’s return with just two words:
“Well done.”
* * *
“KANE?” BALAM ASKED. “Kane, are you okay?”
Kane’s eyes snapped open, and he found himself staring into the upturned bulblike face of the pale-skinned Balam. His head ached, swimming still with the
intrusive memories of his enemy. He had spent three days beneath the ocean in the company of that monster, it seemed, sharing his thoughts. To be brought back from that was jarring, and Kane tamped down the wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm him.
He was on the floor of a dark room, its proportions so vast that he could not see the walls. There were shelves and containment units scattered all around, spreading out from him in all directions along great aisles that filled the vast room. Despite its size, the room was windowless, an underground store in the city of Agartha, and it was lit only in patches, small cones of light emanating from the ceiling and leaving much of the vast space in darkness.
“I’m okay,” Kane slurred, pulling himself up to a sitting position and regretting it as soon as he did it. He slumped back, feeling the hard floor knock against the back of his skull and not caring. The ocean swam in his ears, the whisper of memory plucking at his thoughts.
“How long since we got here?” Kane asked, taking slow, meticulous breaths.
“Fifteen minutes,” Balam told him. “I wasn’t comfortable leaving you any longer than that. I’m sorry.”
The chunk of stone embedded beside Kane’s eye was having a terrible effect on him. Each time he traveled via interphaser it would reconstitute with his own flesh, overwhelming his senses with ancient memories of Ullikummis’s life, fully formed reconstructions that Kane had to live through with no ability to change or control. It was like being trapped as a prisoner in one’s own body. This had been the worst one yet, and coming out of it took Kane a few moments, trying desperately to cling to his own thoughts, his own ego. Balam stood at his side, patiently watching as the ex-
Magistrate recovered.
“Let’s get moving,” Kane said, pulling himself off the floor more slowly this time. “No time to waste, right?”
Balam watched the human in admiration as Kane got to his feet. His sense of dedication was exceptional; his bravery knew no limits.
“We shall use the chair,” Balam said, leading the way from the parallax point that had been their destination. The point was marked by a series of concentric circles that would glow when it was in use. Those circles were dim now.
Kane glanced across the room, taking in what he could with a sweep of his eyes. Balam had previously described this as a museum, and it was filled with alien artifacts, shelved or stored in various ways. To Kane’s eyes it seemed more like a storeroom, all the old junk from civilizations past and future tossed into one vast holding pen where they could rot without fear of causing damage, Inca crap next to Egyptian crap, on and on. Kane’s gaze was drawn to a pile of metal machinery, vast turbines held in cylindrical cups like the engines of a jumbo jet. He wondered what they might be.
Balam was walking with a slight limp now, and he winced as he moved. He had suffered some internal damage from a gunshot when Brigid Haight had attacked him, and he had yet to seek proper medical attention. The last time Kane had raised this, just a few hours earlier, Balam had dismissed him in a rare display of pride.
After a brief walk through the wide aisles of the storeroom, Balam and Kane came upon a huge, curve-sided cube that rested beneath a bank of lights. The cube was twenty feet square, and its walls were opaque but shimmering. Scooping his hands together, Balam arrowed his fingertips at the shimmering surface and they cut through it, parting the wall like a waterfall cascade. Kane followed as Balam led the way into the strange, stand-alone room, the wall resealing behind them.
Within, the cube had the rich smell of plant life, the air heady with the scent of living things, a smell like mulch. Kane felt the air like a wall, its richness overwhelming his nostrils for a moment.
The strange room was empty apart from one item held in its very center: a chair. The chair had a curved back and ran down on a single, thick leg like a tree trunk that ended in a splayed structure arrayed across the floor. The back of the chair curved like a spine, and two arms struck out from its sides. The chair was Annunaki in design and Kane had seen its ilk before; in fact, he had used this one just a few hours earlier. It was an Annunaki navigator’s chair designed for use in space travel. Within, the chair held a databank of information that could either be projected or fed directly to the user’s mind, and it could be employed to scan for specific locations and items within the immediate area. In this case, the “immediate area” was of a scale that dwarfed comprehension, given the vast distances involved in space travel, where one navigated in terms of light-years rather than miles.
Balam and Kane had utilized this chair just a few hours before, when Kane had accessed its semiliving circuitry to track down Brigid via the anam-chara bond they shared. It was this investigation that had led them to the island fortress of Bensalem, but it transpired that the two of them had arrived too late.
“We shall try again,” Balam said as Kane walked across the room to the lonely chair.
Kane sat down, tentatively placing his arms down on the armrests. After a moment, the chair engaged, and Kane felt a thrumming against his back as the chair itself seemed to come to life. Kane winced as the chair’s arms fired spines into his flesh, piercing the heels of his hands and running along the underside of his forearms like a rush of insect feet. Kane braced himself as the back of the chair shook and thorny, plantlike tendrils emerged from the headrest and started to wrap around his face.
“You’ll need to concentrate on Brigid,” Balam reminded Kane, “focus on the bond you share with her.”
Kane was not sure whether he had closed his eyes at first, as the chair’s visions channeled through him; it was suddenly hard to remember. He was plunged into a new sensory world, a new way of looking, and it felt as if his brain was being pounded with snow. He was linked to Bal
am by the optical bond, and that link allowed Balam to see what he was seeing, too. Beside him, Balam closed his eyes in a slow blink, letting Kane’s visions rush over him, oozing into them with more comfort than Kane felt.
“Persevere,” Balam told Kane. “You shall survive this.”
To Kane, Balam’s voice seemed to come from a distance now, faraway and ethereal. He had to concentrate on the words as the visions of the chair hurtled through him, colors and patterns and shapes to his left and his right, up and down.
Before Kane’s eyes, the world seemed to be spinning, breaking apart, the gaps between things widening. Taking a determined, deep breath, Kane thought about Brigid Baptiste, instructing the astrogation chair to guide him to her.
Symbiotically linked with Kane now, the chair catalyzed his endorphins, bringing him a breath of happiness as it reached out to find the person he was searching for.
The vision quest had begun.
Chapter 9
On a neatly manicured lawn on the Pacific Coast, Kudo and Brewster Philboyd turned to face each other, their mouths agape.
“What the hell...?” Brewster began.
Several hundred yards ahead of them, they could clearly see dark smoke billowing from the single-story structure where Cerberus had set up its temporary home. The smoke was thick and black, and orange tongues of flame danced within the plume that reached into the sky. There were gunshots, too, and shouting, all of it echoing out across the lawn, mingling with the repetitive shush-shushing sound of the ocean washing against the cliff to their left.
“We must do something,” Kudo announced in a firm, no-nonsense tone.
Brewster eyed the man for a moment. His face was red, the skin damaged along his left jowl as if attacked with eczema. His body hung heavy, his movements weary as he carried the pale-skinned figure of Domi in his arms. He was exhausted, Brewster could tell.
