by James Axler
The Annunaki warriors carried out their repairs in silence, occasionally bumping into one another as they worked in teams of twos and threes. Grant had no idea how he and Rosalia would get past them. There were simply too many, and the room was too exposed to hide from all of them.
Grant indicated the landing deck. “It’s too busy,” he explained in a low voice. “We wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Rosalia nodded, her lips pursed in thought. “A distraction, then,” she proposed. “Want for me to dance for them?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Grant assured her.
Rosalia watched as Grant reached into one of the pouches of his belt and plucked out a tiny spherical object. The sphere was small enough to rest comfortably in the palm of Grant’s hand, and it featured a metallic shell.
Rosalia smiled, recognizing it. “Of course, you have your little firecrackers.”
“Flash-bangs,” Grant corrected. “I used up all the explosives breaking in here the first time. But I still have a few tricks.
“You may want to look away,” he added, “and cover your ears, too.”
Grant rolled the flash-bang ball across the decking before him, watching as it rolled toward a pile of skinlike plating that was waiting to be used for repairs.
Counting down in his head, Grant placed his hands over his ears and waited for the charge to ignite. The flash-bang was a tiny explosive that did exactly what its name implied—creating a big flash and a loud bang but doing no additional damage, a little like a firework. Grant habitually carried a variety of these little capsules, which featured various effects, from billowing thick smoke on command to creating a foul stench. The flash-bang would generate a burst of light and sound so bright and loud that it could temporarily blind and deafen an unsuspecting foe, but it left no permanent damage.
With a cacophony of conflagration, the diminutive explosive went off, lighting the large deck like a star going nova.
Grant grabbed Rosalia’s hand, pulling her to her feet. “Come on,” he urged.
Rosalia opened her screwed-up eyes and followed Grant into the landing deck of the starship. Despite having her eyes closed and her hands over her ears, she had heard the explosion and seen its flash against her eyelids, playing like sunlight across a sleeper’s eyes. Now she saw Annunaki warriors rocking to and fro as they tried to recover from the sudden burst of light. Their ears were ringing with the furious noise, masking any sound that Grant’s and Rosalia’s boots made as they hurried across the metallike plating of the deck. Shouts of confusion came from all about, calls in an alien tongue that Rosalia could not recognize.
In just a handful of seconds, the two Cerberus warriors had made it halfway across the vast cabin, and Grant ducked behind a stack of waiting deck plate, ordering Rosalia to his side.
All around them, the Annunaki were recovering as the effects of the flash-bang dissipated. Several Annunaki paced warily toward where the flash-bang had ignited, peering at the remains—just a little dust and the remnants of the fuse—where they lay by the skin plates. Others were already searching all around, scurrying to the open drop-down doorway that led into the streets.
“What now?” Rosalia whispered.
Grant watched the reptilian figures shuffling all about, trying to tag them all in his mind. “I’ll try another flash-bang,” he suggested in a low voice, “but they’ll probably react faster this time, now they know it’s not going to hurt them.”
But as he spoke, another startling factor came into play. Three Annunaki had disappeared past the edge of the door to see whether they were under attack just moments before. Without warning, two of them came sailing through the air back into the room, closely
followed by their remaining companion. Then the deck resounded with hammer blows as Ullikummis strode into the room, his huge tree-stump-like feet bashing against the plate with crashing beats.
As Grant and Rosalia watched this newcomer, two more figures came in his wake, following as his obedient entourage. Grant recognized them both and so did Rosalia. The child was Little Quav. And the red-haired woman who held the child’s hand was...
“Brigid?” Grant blurted, incredulous.
Chapter 11
Grant’s utterance was lost to the sounds of Ullikummis’s footsteps as he pounded up the drop-down door and onto the plate decking, tossing another Annunaki aside with a sharp flick of his arm. Behind him, the sounds of battle echoed through the city of bone, getting louder and closer. Ullikummis had broken through the ranks, a leader to the end.
Behind the stacked deck plates, Grant raised himself from his crouch, motioning toward the figure of Brigid Baptiste. “What th—?” he began.
Grasping his arm from where they hid, Rosalia hissed for Grant to keep silent. “Remember what we saw in the cavern,” she told him, glaring into his eyes. “Your friend can’t be trusted now.”
Grant bit back a curse, grinding his teeth in frustration. Rosalia was right. A trusted member of the Cerberus fraternity, Brigid Baptiste had been missing for more than two months, ever since the Cerberus redoubt was invaded. Less than a week earlier, Grant and Rosalia, along with Kane and Domi, had bumped into this red-haired woman in a cavern close to Luilekkerville, where she had proceeded to shoot Kane in the chest. Whether it really was Brigid—and the jury was out so far as Grant was concerned—there was something decidedly unfriendly about her now. While he wanted to make contact, to alert this woman to his presence to see how she would react, showing his hand too soon may not be the smartest idea, Grant realized.
Instead, he watched in silence as the red-haired woman followed Ullikummis across the hangar bay, using her familiar TP-9 pistol to blast the living hell out of any Annunaki warriors who managed to sidestep the rock lord’s devastating attacks and get close to her and Little Quav.
As Grant watched, another of the naked Annunaki, this one shimmering in a rainbow coat of scales with a crest of spines along the Y-axis of his head, ducked under one of Ullikummis’s lunging arms and ran at Brigid and the child. Brigid’s arm was already raised, holding the TP-9 out before her, its brutal lines like an awful mechanical extension of her own body. The blaster kicked in her hand, delivering a burst of 9 mm bullets into the face of her would-be attacker. The resplendent Annunaki fell back, spitting like a cat as he fixed the redhead with his gaze.
With no apparent concern for her own safety, the woman who looked like Brigid Baptiste leaped at the Annunaki warrior, charging toward him and bringing her pistol around in an abbreviated arc, its muzzle spitting bullet after bullet into the creature’s face and thorax. The Annunaki’s chest and face popped with sparks where those bullets struck his armorlike skin, whizzing off in all directions as the warrior shook in place.
The Annunaki’s vision was impaired in that second, and Brigid took advantage of that, grabbing one of the spines that protruded from his skull and using it as a handle to pull the creature forward and down. Unbalanced, the Annunaki tumbled forward at the same moment as the red-haired woman shoved her pistol forward, ramming it into her foe’s open mouth. There was a burst of muffled gunfire, and then the woman stepped back as the rainbow-skinned Annunaki crashed to the deck, smoke and blood mingling as they gushed from his ruined mouth.
Grant winced as he watched the brutal display, trying to recognize his longtime friend in the performance. Brigid was acting as a bodyguard for the child, he understood, placing herself in harm’s way against any threats to her charge. But to use such savagery, to dispatch her foes with such utter disdain for them or her own well-being, left Grant feeling sick to his stomach.
Nearby, Ullikummis continued to plow through the other warriors, slapping them aside as they swarmed on him at the halfway point of the hangar bay, close to where Grant and Rosalia were hidden. Working in tandem, two of the Annunaki came at Ullikummis from opposite sides, grasping for the hornlike stru
ctures that jutted from his mighty shoulders. Ullikummis spun, trying to shake off the creatures, but both clung on as if their lives depended on it. Then the Annunaki began to pull at their foe, dragging him down and forcing him to bend first one way and then the other. Finally, Ullikummis tumbled down, his stone frame dropping to the deck with the force of an avalanche.
A ripple of excitement ran through the other Annunaki in the room, and they swarmed upon Ullikummis as he struggled beneath the weight of their colleagues. Brigid used her blaster to pick off a few, but Ullikummis disappeared beneath fifteen glistening bodies of scaled armor.
Watching this, Grant held his breath. For a full minute, it seemed that Ullikummis might be defeated, and the room went deathly quiet as he was held in place.
The only sound to echo through the room in those moments was the sweet voice of the child, Quav. “Is Ullikummis okay, Brigly?” she asked, tugging at Brigid’s hand where the warrior woman waited poised with her TP-9.
Brigid didn’t answer.
Then, without warning, the scrum of Annunaki bodies seemed to explode into the air as Ullikummis shrugged them off, tossing them this way and that as he rose once more in their midst. His face was an eerie stone mask, no recognition showing there that these lizardlike creatures were in fact his own people, Annunaki just like him.
Grant and Rosalia ducked lower as one of the brave warriors hurtled past their hiding place, crashing against the grown-plate wall with a clang of metal. The reptilian warrior dropped to the floor, a hunk of the ruined hull careening after him.
“Come on, Magistrate,” Rosalia urged, getting to her feet. “Time to go.”
Rosalia was right. With everyone’s attention drawn to the continuing combat with Ullikummis, there was a brief opportunity for her and Grant to escape the room and get deeper into the ship unnoticed. They ran close to the wall, keeping to the shadows, their heads down as they made a beeline for the far doorway.
Behind them, they could hear Ullikummis grunting words in ancient Sumerian, glaring at the surrounding Annunaki with his fierce, magma-pool eyes. As they reached the far door, Grant turned back, his eyes scanning the room for a moment. In that instant, something incredible happened. Ullikummis had retreated a few paces so that he stood before Brigid and the hybrid child, Grant saw, the bloodied Annunaki warriors arrayed before him. His right arm moved in an arc
before his torso, drawing a delicate pattern in the air. As Grant watched, that impossible pattern seemed to linger in place, tearing a hole in the air itself. The hole glowed with a swirl of color, lightning crackling in its depths like witchfire. Grant recognized it, or at least he knew something similar enough to make the connection—it was an interphase window, a gateway from one parallax point to another. But such gateways required an interphaser, didn’t they? How Ullikummis had created one merely by drawing a pattern in the air was beyond Grant’s comprehension.
“¡Vámonos!” Rosalia hissed from behind Grant. “No time to watch the floor show.”
Grant turned, hurrying into the corridor that waited beyond the hangar bay, grasping his Sin Eater as he ran. Behind him, the quantum window grew wider, allowing Ullikummis and his two companions to step through, disappearing from the hangar deck. The Annunaki ran to follow, halted in their tracks as that incredible rift in space-time winked out of existence. They were alone once more in the hangar, as if Ullikummis and his companions had never been.
* * *
SIMILAR TO THE ONES CREATED by the interphaser, Ullikummis’s gateway was the product of a clearer comprehension of the world structures around him. The Annunaki were multidimensional beings, their perception of the world far more layered than the simplistic understanding held by humans. While in the Ontic Library, Ullikummis had studied the ways in which space could be folded upon itself, moving the proximity of its geographic points. The trick took concentration, twining two points together like threads on a subatomic level.
Ullikummis had used this trick on several occasions, most notably when he had launched his attack on the Cerberus redoubt all those months ago, bypassing its sensors and reaching the roll-back doors undetected. He had shown it to Brigid, too, his hand in darkness, and she had employed it to enter the hidden city of Agartha, shifting planes infinitesimally to step through the rocks that masked its door. Most recently, Ullikummis had used the same principle to open the multirift, the one that called on his faithful to come fight in the god war for possession of Tiamat.
Any technology that was sufficiently advanced would look like magic to others, after all. That had always been the way with the Annunaki, and even in the twenty-third century their advances dwarfed anything created by the hands of man.
* * *
OUTSIDE TIAMAT, the war continued apace. Sela Stone, formerly Sinclair, found herself close to the front in the major push toward the grounded starship, driving against the living barricades of the Annunaki warriors. The Annunaki were impossibly strong; strong enough in fact that it had taken less than two hundred of them to repel close to three thousand humans. Statistically, the Annunaki should have fallen by now.
A troop of Annunaki warriors hurried toward Sela from both sides, the gold of their swords flashing in the sunlight as they cut down her colleagues. Sela danced aside as the man next to her—a dark-skinned farmhand who was no more than twenty-one—tumbled toward her in two halves, his body cleaved in two by the swords of the Annunaki. Others were unarmed, but each of their attacks ended in broken bones and crushed skulls, one woman screaming as her spinal column was wrenched from her flesh through her skin, the Annunaki who had committed the brutal attack wielding the spine like a trophy. Sela’s Colt pistol blasted, drumming bullets into the Annunaki warrior as his tongue lapped at the woman’s blood that had spurted across his face.
Suddenly, Sela fell, a glancing blow striking her in the back and throwing her to the ground. She slammed into the cobblelike paving, her forehead crunching against it with that awful, dull thud of bone on bone.
All around Sela, the human army was making progress. It was loyal to Ullikummis, and those most loyal had been enslaved by the gift of the most potent of the obedience stones, the ones that could transform their flesh into stone like an aspect of Ullikummis himself. It was those warriors—the firewalkers or the new Magistrates depending on your point of view—who led the column that finally drove the Annunaki back into the heart of the city.
Sela Stone pulled herself from the ground, scanning the paving around her until she spotted her Colt Mark IV, the familiar dancing horse engraved on its barrel. Her nose was bloodied and her head was ringing, but there was something else; the beat was gone, receding, leaving her mind clearer than it had been in at least two months.
Sela sat on the paving, trying to gather her thoughts. As she looked around, she felt like a spectator to the battle. Born in the twentieth century, Sela was a “freezie.” She had been cryogenically frozen and shipped to the Manitius Moon Base, to be held there in stasis until nuclear hostilities had finally subsided. Sela was a trained naval officer, her fighting prowess was regimented and she belonged in the upper echelon of a human’s capabilities. She was in the thick of things now, and yet she could only watch as the firewalkers worked together in teams to pick off each of the unclothed Annunaki who defended the great dragon ship. Sela’s own efforts, each tribute to the glory of her master and the New Order he promised, were small and hasty by contrast, shooting at the Annunaki warriors, helping defend and hold the positions as the firewalkers gained territory in the narrow, winding lanes of the dragon’s wings.
Sela saw those enhanced humans working their slingshots like shotguns, utilizing their changed skin as a barricade against the vicious assaults of their relentless foes. Many fell, but the numbers were massive now, each warrior pledging his life to Ullikummis and the future he promised. And as she watched, mute witness to the bloodshed on both sides, Sela Stone wondered a
t the changes in the so-called firewalkers. Had they been blessed with a weapon from their god, or had everyone here been given something else? Was this battle about bodies and numbers and an age-old blood feud, or was it truly being fought with emotion—two sides who had sworn loyalty to something they believed greater than themselves?
Stopped in place, Sela looked around as her fellow humans were cut down, hacked at with swords, bones broken under the brutal attacks of the Annunaki. And, for the first time in months, she saw things the way they used to be. Humans, bloody humans. Caught up in a myth, a trick by the Annunaki. The many following the few, just as it had been millennia ago when all of this had started. Had the humans been duped with a promise of utopia? Was that all that this was for?
* * *
INSIDE THE BODY of the great dragon ship, Enlil was observing the battle from the scanning room. So much of Tiamat had atrophied, whole sections of the wall beside him glistened as if they were weeping.
The Igigi, reborn as Annunaki for his new pantheon, were putting up a solid fight but they were being driven back, cut down by the sheer force of numbers arrayed against them. His enemy had planned well, bringing an almost unlimited supply of troops through the quantum rift at the edge of his territory. Were circumstances different, Overlord Enlil would have admired the planning. Had he not been on the wrong side of it, that was.
As Enlil watched the smoky displays cycle through different aspects of the battle, something flashed in the air and he heard the alert signal, like wind chimes in the breeze. It was confirmation that the ship had been compromised, that someone now walked in the corridors of power, the living arteries of the mother ship Tiamat. Enlil narrowed his eyes and they flicked to the side, accessing the correct datastream that would show where the breach had occurred. He saw who it was, familiar even after all these centuries. His son, Ullikummis, here aboard the mother womb, come home at last.
