by James Axler
It took five seconds but finally the serpent weapon unlooped from Ullikummis’s stone form, rocketing away from his body and lashing against a wall, its energy spent. It waited there against the floor, twitching like a living thing, dimming and glowing as the energy coursed through it. Ullikummis ignored it.
Enlil lay on the bone deck, his lips pulled back in a grimace, the last vestiges of lightning playing across his teeth. Ullikummis took a step toward him, closing the gap between them, his eight-foot form towering over the fallen figure of his father.
“You had four thousand years to prepare for this,” Ullikummis said.
“An eyeblink to the likes of us,” Enlil dismissed.
Ullikummis shook his head. “Blood calls to blood, the prince succeeds where the king failed. This world is mine now, and I shall gift it to my mother, reborn in the paradise I am building for her. Your reign is at its end, Father. You are a child of the serpent, but you never left the safety of the kindergarten.”
Without warning, Enlil sprang from the floor, striking with the speed of a cobra as he lunged for his son’s face. Momentarily caught off guard, Ullikummis tried to step aside as Enlil hurtled at him, a savage sneer on his lips.
“You have no inkling of where the playpen walls end, child,” Enlil spit contemptuously as his face loomed close to Ullikummis’s. “Nor of who oversees the charges.”
In that instant, Enlil’s eyes met with those of his son and the two of them began their battle anew, shifting the battle to the next plane as their multifaceted forms warred amid the cosmic whirl.
Chapter 13
Engage.
Kane was starting to lose his grip on what was real. Objectively he knew he was sitting in a chair beneath the hidden city of Agartha, and yet trying to square that information with the reality he seemed to be experiencing was becoming harder by the second.
Physically his body was sitting in a navigator’s chair of Annunaki design, a techno-organic symbiote intended to assist in the mapping of pathways through the universe. The Annunaki had come to Earth from the planet Nibiru, traveling across many millions of miles to investigate a new and interesting world on the cusp of childhood. The chair fed the subject with images straight into their brain, bypassing the eyes in favor of the mind’s eye, the same part of the brain utilized in dreaming and imagining. This meant that Kane could theoretically open his eyes and see both the world about him and the incredible relay of images being pumped directly into his brain.
But therein lay another conundrum. Kane had been rapidly losing his sight over the past few weeks, and he had reached a stage where he might be struck temporarily blind for extended periods of time, most especially after the discorporation process of matter transfer involved in a mat-trans jump. The problem had become so pressing that Balam, as a telepath, had felt
compelled to intervene, using a mind link to grant Kane a form of sight that was a few steps removed from what he was used to.
All of which meant that Kane was now sitting in an alien chair, watching imagery being pumped into his brain’s optic nerve while Balam stood nearby, seeing and tapping the same images but only in the role of passive observer.
Kane saw the world opening up in a new and unexpected form, and it reminded him of the thermal-
imaging cameras he had used occasionally during his duties as a Magistrate. Agartha waited around him, but it was a different Agartha from the one he knew, all vibrant colors and tabs and arrows. Kane looked at it, feeling as if he was lucid dreaming, walking the narrow streets with the disconcerting sense that he was floating. He was in the streets above the storeroom, his view most likely centered on the approximate position of the astrogator’s chair. It was overwhelming, real and yet unreal.
“Stay focused, Kane,” Balam instructed from somewhere nearby.
Automatically Kane turned, searching for the speaker of those words where he should be at his shoulder. Balam was not there, and Kane realized he was not surprised. This was a virtual world, or maybe a living photograph, like the kind of live video feed that Cerberus utilized to monitor planet Earth.
As he turned, Kane saw a new range of options open up before him, data hurtling across his vision in gaudy, floating panes of information that tagged everything he saw. Kane could not read the language that was written there, floating in the air like a glass slide, and when he stared at it, the image itself changed, zooming in on the building it had tagged or flipping through a dozen separate still images that somehow related to what he had been peering at.
The information was branching, Kane realized, bringing layer upon layer of new detail for every item he looked at. When it came to charting distant stars, Kane guessed, like earthlings, the Annunaki would need to know what dangers the territory might bring. Could they breathe there? Were there predators? The astrogation chair was like a living encyclopedia, cramming megabytes of information into every inch of space.
Focus is right, Kane told himself. A man could soon get overwhelmed by the oodles of irrelevant detail he was being bombarded with here.
He drew a steadying breath, marveling at the way the image of the streets seemed to roll with the movement of his chest despite the obvious fact he was not actually standing there.
As he breathed out, something else came over Kane’s vision, more windows of information hanging in front of his eyes, branching even as he acknowledged them, more panels and tabs opening with every twitch of his eyes. The astrogator’s chair was working out the content of his breath, breaking it down into the component parts and relaying information about each one back to him from its capacious databanks.
“Okay,” Kane said, speaking the word aloud in an effort to help ground himself. “Let’s just take this slow, think it through.”
He was viewing a datastream, plunged deep into a cacophony of disordered information that he needed to sort through to get to what he wanted—Brigid Baptiste’s location. It was, ironically, the kind of task Brigid was ideally suited to with her archivist background and her eidetic memory. But if she had been here, none of this would have been necessary.
The flow of data pulsed before Kane, adding an extra dimension to everything he looked at. And he stood there—if it could even be called standing—watching as the explosion of data expanded across his mind’s eye.
No, Kane reminded himself. He was not watching; he was guiding. He could control the imagery, instructing it to do his bidding, to follow his will. He was here to find Brigid, nothing more than that. It was Kane who decided what to look at within this strange new map—no one else.
With a determined grunt, Kane commanded the chair to seek her out.
* * *
LAKESH STOOD AMID THE wreckage of the control room speaking to Donald Bry while Reba DeFore bandaged the latter’s wounds. Bry looked more disheveled than ever, with his copper hair in disarray and a bloody smear running down the side of his face. However, despite some superficial cuts and being a little shaken up, he was fine.
“The computers took several knocks,” Bry was explaining, “but I think we can salvage something.”
Lakesh looked at a wrecked terminal. A stone projectile had smashed through it during their battle with the hooded intruders, and both screen and keyboard had been ruined beyond repair. “What about our communications?” he asked.
Over by one wall, Brewster Philboyd was kneeling before another terminal, running through a reboot sequence to bring the computer unit back to life.
“Just bringing them back online now,” Brewster explained. “Booting up okay. We’ll be at the moment of truth in about ninety seconds.” Brewster’s lanky frame looked uncomfortable working from the floor like this, but both of the room’s swivel chairs had lost casters during the scuffle.
At that moment, Domi paced back into the room, shaking her head, with Shizuka trotting along behind her. Domi had been on
an errand to assess the rest of Shizuka’s lodge while DeFore was patching up Lakesh’s wounds prior to turning her attention to Donald Bry.
“My love?” Lakesh prompted as he saw her enter.
Domi offered him a haunted look. “Hell of a mess,” she stated regretfully.
Lakesh nodded. Domi’s conclusions were pretty much what he had expected.
“My men have secured the lodge,” Shizuka added, “and they are now surveying the local area. So long as you don’t object to the smell of smoke, we should be safe for now.”
“Yes,” Lakesh acknowledged, “but how long will that last?”
Shizuka said nothing, but her expression showed her concern. The lodge could not be protected for long, as she had neither the manpower nor the armament to hold up a force of determined individuals like Ullikummis’s firewalkers. Back in New Edo, her own people were stretched to the breaking point defending against similar infiltrators.
Bry smiled curtly as DeFore finished cleaning the wound on his forehead. “We could move the whole operation again, Lakesh,” he suggested. “Not impossible—we’ve proved that now.”
“Yes,” Lakesh mused, absentmindedly stroking his fingers across his chin, “but where would we go, Donald? We are running out of safe places to hide.”
“Shouldn’t be hiding anyway,” Domi spit, venom in her voice.
“Now, my dearest one,” Lakesh chastised gently, “we must respond to our circumstances or, as the old phrase had it, needs must when the devil drives.”
“So?” Domi replied. “Drive out devil.”
“Easier said than done, I’m afraid,” Lakesh admitted.
Brewster spoke up once more from his position by the wall. “Communications are back online. We’re live if you want us to be.”
Lakesh looked thoughtful for a moment, gazing out through the shattered glass of the French doors and into the delicately tended garden, so incongruous in this battle zone. “Pass me a headset,” he ordered, “and patch me through to Kane. On speaker, if you will.”
* * *
HIS MIND FED by the astrogator’s chair, Kane hurtled across the planet in a rush of blurred sensation. The sun swelled like a great fiery disk in the sky while beneath him the ground seemed to have become a series of straight lines, stacked atop one another like the child’s game of pickup sticks. It was a representation of reality, he knew, and yet it felt real to his brain, feeding all of his senses in new and unheard-of ways, making everything novel.
This must be how a baby sees the world, Kane thought. Everything was arrayed before him to be interpreted for the very first time.
He had commanded the chair to locate Brigid Baptiste, but despite the movement he felt no pull. He was flying over a racing panorama, and yet it was nothing like flying. It was like stepping through a waterfall, the water lashing at his body with detail and information, droplets swelling with data he would never have enough time to absorb. Beneath his feet, the ground seemed to swell like the waves of the ocean, an illusion of movement with no physical sense involved. The dichotomy of the two conflicting messages made Kane feel nauseous, and he probed with his tongue, feeling as if that organ was enlarging to fill his mouth. The sense of nonmovement was alien to Kane, confusing his senses the way the early motion pictures had confused their viewers, making them flee in terror as a photographed steam train seemed to hurtle toward them.
The chair was geared to alien senses—those of the Annunaki—and it took some getting used to.
If the chair was locating Brigid, then it was doing so with no sense feeding back to Kane, no noticeable tug. It simply did, without coloring its actions with emotion. And that, too, felt alien to Kane, and it took him a moment to realize why. The navigator’s chair was inside his head, running information directly into his brain, and to have information delivered in that way, with no opinion, no interpretation, was inhuman.
Suddenly, a voice blurted in his head, so loud Kane was startled.
“Kane, do you read?”
It was Lakesh, but for a moment Kane couldn’t make sense of it. It took him two seconds to realize the voice was not a part of the navigation chair software but was his Commtact springing back to life.
“Lakesh,” Kane replied, engaging his Commtact, “what’s happening?”
“We’ve had something of an upset here, my friend,” Lakesh explained, “but nothing we can’t handle. Wondering how your search is going.”
“I’m using a...tracking device to locate Baptiste,” Kane stated.
“Her transponder’s still not operational,” Lakesh reasoned.
“Different tech,” Kane summarized. “Annunaki lost and found, something Balam had in storage down in Agartha.” As he spoke, the world before Kane’s senses hurtled in a rush of color and shape, morphing and blurring as he hurtled toward his destination. Already he was learning to look past it, ignoring the mad paint splatter of once-familiar views. “Takes the wind out of you, though.”
As Kane raced across borders drawn in reds and purples and sapphire, his mind expanding far beyond anything he could accurately describe, he saw a sparkling before him like the blinking of an eye. The sparkling was lightning bright, like the twinkling of a star. He gazed at it, feeling a mixture of wonder and confusion, and as he did so his body seemed to be thrust closer, and as it was, the world about him took on familiar shapes and contours once more, solidifying as if it were something that had previously been hidden behind a gossamer-thin curtain.
Kane stopped, the lines solidifying all about him, the strange star glistening in place. In a moment, he was upon it, and he saw what it was.
“Baptiste...” he breathed, the word coming out as nothing more than a whisper.
Brigid Baptiste stood before him, as beautiful as ever, her slender body sheathed in the black leather suit that fitted like a glove, her fire-red hair bursting from her skull like a nuclear explosion. She scowled, and Kane saw dark lines streaked across her face, covering her eyes and darkening her lips. She appeared utterly unaware of his presence, even though he seemed to be standing no more than a foot from her face.
“My anam-chara,” Kane said as he gazed into Brigid’s emerald eyes. “My soul friend.”
“Kane?” It was Lakesh’s voice once more, searing into his thoughts like acid. “What’s happening there?”
“I’ve found Baptiste,” Kane explained. As he did so, his sense of euphoria passed and he started to take in the surroundings properly for the first time. They came into view like a camera pulling focus, blurring into abrupt sharpness.
Brigid Baptiste was standing in a midsize room with sloping walls and a pool of swirling liquid that dominated its center. The liquid was milky-white and its surface glistened despite the chamber’s dimmed, purple lighting. The pool’s surface was at the same level as the floor, and Kane assumed it was some kind of pit that dominated the room.
Within the pool, placed directly in its center, stood a wide stone structure a little shorter than Brigid herself. Kane recognized the structure, or at least its ilk—it was the same as the stone egg he had found in the fortress Bensalem, where he and Balam had come across the twisted genetic copy of Little Quav.
Lakesh spoke again, his voice intruding on Kane’s thoughts. “Kane, where are you?”
It took a moment for Kane to frame his response. “A simulation... I’m not sure,” he admitted.
The simulation moved in real time, and yet as Kane looked at it he saw it was imperfect, a blur to the movements, a fractured nature to the areas he was not directly examining.
“I’ll pull back,” he said after a moment, trusting the Commtact to transmit his words over the thousands of miles between himself, his body and Lakesh.
As he said it, the room became smaller and a tag
appeared identifying it in the swirling script of the Annunaki. Ka
ne had no chance of translating that script, but if he could have read it he would have seen he was in the ante-nursery of the starship Tiamat.
Kane was fed more information as the image became larger, seeing the arterial pathways that ran through the great dragon ship and her location across the banks of the Euphrates. But something else tugged at Kane’s attention as he pulled back, a shimmering red swirl, like blood, dropped in water.
“What the hell is that?” Kane muttered.
Even as he said it, Kane reacted without meaning to, turning toward the crimson swirl and, thanks to the mechanics of the navigation chair, being dragged closer to it. The swirl rushed in space like a twister, and Kane saw now that it was just a room away from where Brigid Baptiste guarded the stone cocoon.
“What have you found?” Lakesh asked over the Commtact, while at the same time Balam’s voice came from farther away asking, “What is it, friend Kane?”
Kane ignored them both, his senses rushing in to get a closer look at the whir of scarletlike blood. The walls to the chamber fell into place via the interpretive software of the astrogation chair, building first as transparencies, then blocking into place with lines of solid color. This chamber was larger, Kane saw, and almost empty, a series of interconnected arches spanning from floor to ceiling in an asymmetric hexagonal pattern.
As Kane watched, the red swirl seemed to coalesce, uniting into first one form and then splitting into two. Kane’s breath caught in his throat as he saw them, recognizing them both instantly. The red swirling mists continued to curl within them, but the two had taken on the definite shapes of Overlord Enlil and Ullikummis, his son.
Kane watched as the great rock being was flung across the chamber as if caught in a hurricane, careering a few feet over the decking until he slammed into one of the arching walls. Enlil gestured wildly, but if he spoke then Kane was not privy to the sound.
Instead he heard Balam, his voice filled with trepidation. “Friend Kane,” Balam urged, “you should step away from this. You should do so immediately.”
