by James Axler
“Why?” Kane asked, realizing that the psychic link that the two of them now shared allowed Balam to see everything that Kane viewed via the chair.
“They will see you,” Balam explained doubtfully.
“We’re hundreds of miles away, Balam,” Kane reminded his colleague. “This is just remote observation.”
“They will sense you, Kane,” Balam explained, and in so doing he explained nothing.
It was as if the First Folk guardian could not quite frame the concept into words, Kane suspected, and he got the sense that he was entering some medium that no human had ever seen before.
The figures moved in their dance of combat, but there was another level to the motions, something Kane had never witnessed before. It was like watching a camera on double exposure, and Kane’s brain ached as he tried to decipher all that he was seeing.
Seven feet tall, Ullikummis whipped across the chamber in a spectacular charge, hooking Enlil with one of his scythelike shoulder ridges and knocking the bronze-hued Annunaki back. But at the same time, Kane saw something else happen, a blast of light and color that seemed disassociated with the familiar humanoid figures. It was almost as if it wasn’t there at all, like the phantom images left on the eye after looking at the sun—a light of darkness, a color unseen.
Kane tried his best to describe what he was seeing, stunned by the strange depth of his newfound perspective.
* * *
LAKESH TRIED to make sense of the information as he listened to Kane’s report within the temporary operations room of the Cerberus base.
“It’s almost like he’s describing some kind of Doppler effect,” Lakesh suggested, “though one that can be seen rather than heard.”
The Doppler effect referred to the apparent increase or decrease in frequency as an observer neared the subject, and it was best known as the effect generated by an approaching police siren. The effect was achieved by the modulation of the sound or other waves involved, but neither Lakesh nor his colleagues had heard of such an effect being associated with vision.
Sitting at the communications rig, Brewster Philboyd pulled the black-framed glasses from the bridge of his nose and rubbed at his eyes. “Could it be a product of the vision chair that Kane is utilizing?” he asked.
“Undoubtedly,” Lakesh agreed, “and yet there’s something more to it, I’m sure of that. Call it a gut instinct, if you will.”
Across the room, Donald Bry groaned as he brought up information on another of the linked computer terminals that served the temporary Cerberus base. “Kane is a remote viewer to the situation at the Euphrates,” he reminded everyone. “With respect to your gut, Lakesh, he is at best a witness to events he has no control over.”
Lakesh snorted. “Isn’t that always the case with Kane?”
* * *
IN THE UNDERGROUND city of Agartha, Balam stood outside the gel-walled room watching Kane’s physical body rock and struggle in the grip of the living chair. With spiny growths emanating from the chair and worming themselves under Kane’s skin as he held his eyes shut, it looked as if the ex-Magistrate was suffering from some terrible nightmare.
“Friend Kane, you must work with the chair and allow it to work through you,” Balam instructed. “The more you fight against it, the worse things will become.”
Kane spit a curse through clenched teeth, acknowledging Balam’s advice with poor humor. “I can’t make out what it is I’m looking at,” he hissed.
“Kane,” Balam said, his voice reasonable and calm, “are you aware of astral projection?”
“Using meditation to let your mind reach out beyond the limitations of your body?” Kane asked. “Yeah. Not a believer.”
“The human experience is beyond my capacity to truly comprehend,” Balam admitted, “but I propose you accept that the chair is augmenting your ability to achieve such astral projection, or at least something closely akin to it.”
“I’m being fed too much information, Balam,” Kane growled. “I can’t make proper sense of it.”
“Remember you can still breathe, Kane,” Balam said gently. “Calm yourself. Let the experience wash over you.”
* * *
FLOATING WITHIN the hexagonal chamber deep in the guts of the great dragon ship, Kane drew a long breath and held it for the count of five before exhaling it gently through his parted lips. Before his eyes, the messy swirl of figures and light continued in their vicious combat, batting each other across the chamber in an ever-changing paint-splatter blur. As he exhaled, Kane saw the blurs become figures again, the burning lights ebb, their blinding illumination turning back to something he could look at without hurting his eyes.
The gods were battling before him, fighting each other to the death. And there was more to it than that, more than Kane had ever seen before. Up to now, Enlil had been a humanoid figure, bronze-scaled with the raiment of a war master. But now it seemed that Kane was seeing so much more, involving a more complete representation of these incredible beings.
“What is it I’m looking at?” Kane growled. “What can I see?”
“The Annunaki are multidimensional beings, Kane,” Balam reminded him. “They exist in more planes than the three dimensions you occupy.”
Lakesh gasped over the Commtact, hearing Balam’s words. “Kane, can you describe what it is you can see?”
Kane looked at them, these two mighty figures throwing each other across the chamber in a Terpsichore of violence. Light seemed to bleed from them, its rays assaulting Kane’s eyes yet leaving his vision intact. The two figures seemed to expand, too, growing larger as they fought yet remaining the same relative size to the room. Kane struggled, trying to describe the scene as best he could. It was cognitive dissonance, the sense of two conflicting realities coexisting, and his brain somehow processing both as if they were separate.
“String theory,” Lakesh mused, once he had heard Kane out.
“Say again?” Kane asked as he watched Enlil drive Ullikummis to the deck, his talons plucking for his
son’s eyes.
“String theory maintains that certain objects may exist in multiple dimensions,” Lakesh briefed, “and that our own universe is merely a veneer on that grand, multidimensional tapestry.”
“You’re getting all theoretical physics on me, man,” Kane growled. “Care to bring it down a notch?”
Lakesh apologized before continuing, framing his explanation as best he could as he spoke to Kane over the Commtact. “In essence,” Lakesh elaborated, “the things we see are merely the edges of multidimensional forms that move through fractal space. If what Balam suggests is correct, that the Annunaki are themselves multidimensional, then what we’ve been seeing up to now could best be described as the edges of their vast shapes.”
“You mean they’re bigger than we thought?” Kane asked.
“Not just bigger,” Lakesh said, “but operating at an entirely alien set of nodal points that we cannot normally comprehend. I believe what you’re looking at—what your brain is trying to process thanks to the chair’s input—is a graphical representation of creatures who exist and duel in the dimensions proposed by string theory.”
Kane seemed mystified.
“It may be easier to imagine the Annunaki as a pen-and-ink drawing on a sheet of paper,” Lakesh said. “Up to now you’ve been looking at that flat illustration and presuming it is complete, but suddenly you’re seeing a third dimension—depth—reaching both into and out from the paper. Compile upon that another level—color—being added, and you can begin to comprehend how a string creature would exist beyond the limits of your earlier assumption.”
“And I can see Ullikummis because of the chunk of him I have wedged in my eye,” Kane realized. “We’re linked, he and I. That’s why I was drawn to this place when I went searching for Baptiste. The chair can only
do so much, and even with our anam-chara bond, the hunk of stone in my head overrode that and drew me like a magnet to its daddy.”
While he spoke, Ullikummis came stumbling toward Kane, both hands cinched around his father’s throat. As Kane watched, the great rock figure looked up and something seemed to flash deep within his burning magma eyes.
“You!” he rumbled in a voice like grinding millstones.
As impossible as it seemed, astral form or not, Kane had been spotted.
Chapter 14
Calling on his mighty reserves of strength, Ullikummis drove his father’s body down against the deck plate once again, his stone hands grasped around the hated figure’s throat. Enlil’s eyes lost focus for a moment at the force of the blow, and Ullikummis felt him go limp in his hands. Then he looked up and saw the other figure in the room, hidden between the earthly planes, disguised within the hidden angles. It was Kane, the apekin whom he had tasked to lead his human armies and who had rejected that offer, killing First Priest Dylan in the process.
“You!” Ullikummis rumbled in a voice like grinding millstones.
The spectral figure of Kane reared back, surprise on his idiot face. The primitive fool had not realized that Ullikummis could see through the veil of this reality, that the god war occurred on many planes at once.
But as Ullikummis readied himself to snag Kane’s astral form, Enlil pulled himself back from the brink of unconsciousness, reaching upward and thrusting his clawed hands in Ullikummis’s open mouth. With a savage yank, Enlil pulled his son’s head down toward him by his jaw, even as Ullikummis tried to bite off his hand.
“I taught you better than this, Ullikummis,” Enlil chastised as he swung himself aside. “Are you lazy or just out of practice?”
Ullikummis slammed into the hard deck plate chin-first, unleashing a savage grunt of anger as his body followed. Behind him, Enlil stepped lightly on the balls of his feet, dancing out of his monstrous son’s reach.
* * *
“SHIT,” KANE CURSED. “He’s seen me. But how can he do that?”
“Kane, you are in grave danger,” Balam said from his safe position outside the cube-shaped room beneath Agartha’s buildings.
“Yeah,” Kane agreed. “That’s how it generally is.” With that, he had dismissed Balam’s concerns and was turning his attention to his surroundings.
Ullikummis was writhing on the floor as Enlil danced out of reach, the latter figure stepping back and forth, keeping his center of gravity low. Pushing himself up, Ullikummis took a moment to look at Kane once more, fixing him with his liquid-fire eyes and inclining his head for just a moment in a nod of acknowledgment. Then the powerful rock god turned his attention back to his father, powering himself off the floor and hurrying at the bronze-hued Annunaki like a missile.
* * *
AS HE LUNGED at the scarlet-cloaked figure of his father, Ullikummis jabbed out with his right hand, sweeping it through the air in a graceful arc. His mother was potentially in danger, and with Kane here—even in astral form—it would not do to allow her to go unprotected. She, too, would come to exist in multiple dimensions upon her rebirth.
* * *
SEVERAL DECKS BELOW, Grant and Rosalia were jogging along a narrow walkway that ran over the water storage area. Ill lit, the shadow-filled room itself was awash with spilled water in an area so massive that it had already adopted its own tidal patterns, breakers roiling back and forth across the vast space. The walkway itself was barely wide enough for one man, its floor arched upward with thin bars like fish bones running along its edges.
As they ran, something hammered through the bottom of the room, sending jets of water violently into the air. The thing continued, driving upward like a striking bolt of jet-black lightning in the darkness, a javelin tossed straight upward.
Grant halted, his hands reaching out for the narrow safety bars that ran along the high walkway even as Rosalia collided with his back.
“What the hell, Magistrate?” Rosalia spit.
Then she saw the javelin-like shards hurtling up and through the walkway, piercing its surface just six feet ahead of where Grant had stopped.
“Automated defenses...?” Grant wondered as the walkway split apart before him.
He and Rosalia clung on as the perilous walkway swung back and forth, its midsection shattered beyond repair. The thick needle of rock continued up through the room and into the ceiling, swiftly followed by a half-dozen identical shards, each one crashing through the roof of the room above the Cerberus warriors’ heads, raining debris on the battered walkway.
“We’re going to have to find an alternative route,” Rosalia screamed as debris crashed down on them from the ruined ceiling.
Grant nodded, the walkway swaying to and fro as it broke free from its mountings. A loud straining noise echoed over the sounds of rushing water below as the narrow path began to career away from its wall attachments.
“Hang on!” Grant shouted.
* * *
AS ULLIKUMMIS POWERED ACROSS the room outside the ante-nursery, a line of rock stalagmites followed in his wake, tracing the curve his right hand drew in the air, bursting through the hull of Tiamat and climbing through her decks in a matter of seconds. Each was as wide as a man’s torso, ripping apart plates of decking as it hurtled into the room from below.
Rock was his to command, and he used it now not as a weapon but as a defense, shielding that which he wished to protect.
At the same instant, the rock lord’s powerful form crashed into that of his father, knocking the older Annunaki backward as he tried to skip aside. Enlil kicked out as he fell, driving himself away from his son’s devastating attack.
Past Ullikummis’s monstrous shoulder armor, Enlil saw the rock columns burst into view, shattering the bone plates of Tiamat’s decking, ripping into her body. Had he time, Enlil would have wept for Tiamat, but already his attention was needed elsewhere. There, close to the back wall of the hexagonal chamber where the doors hid the ante-nursery, the rocks were amassing, creating a line of jagged struts like the bars of a cage. And standing beside them was the ghostly, spectral image of someone—one of the apekin, and one oh-so-familiar to Enlil himself. It was Kane of clan Cerberus. And how had he gotten here?
* * *
“OKAY, PEOPLE,” Kane instructed, taking the lead, “let’s get our bearings and see what’s what.”
The first thing he needed to know was where he was. Kane had rushed here so fast, crossing thousands of miles in just a few minutes, it was hard to put a geographical location onto the world that whirred in his mind. The Annunaki figures struck each other again, rushing past Kane’s vision as he followed their combat, watching as they seemed to collide with him, pass through him, continuing on as if oblivious to his presence.
“Where am I?” Kane muttered, speaking the words aloud.
His vision seemed to bend as the scene before his eyes moved into transition, the hexagonal chamber swelling as if reflected in a droplet of water before shunting him further away. Kane looked, seeing things he recognized even as a series of illuminated tags rushed before his eyes, adding a depth of data to his comprehension.
“I’m in Tiamat,” Kane announced as the battle raged before him. “She looks different than before, but...”
Even as he spoke, the cascade of data rushed before Kane’s eyes, bringing up fixed views of the great spaceship, a rotating wire-frame model, and detailed information on the ship’s stardrive. Kane dismissed the information, unable to take it all in, the language impossible to read.
“Grant and Rosalia are somewhere in there,” Lakesh stated, “or they were.”
A great many miles away, the figure of Kane strained to activate the Commtact unit hidden along the line of his mastoid bone. Normally he could do that without thinking, but instead something peculia
r happened—the vision of the battling Annunaki before him seemed to expand, as if their figures—their presence in the room—were enlarging at an incredible rate.
“Whoa,” Kane muttered, gripped by a sudden sense of vertigo. Something about the chair’s operation clashed with his control over the Commtact, he realized, meaning that while he could speak into the subdermal communications unit, he could not activate it in the normal manner.
Recalling Balam’s earlier advice, Kane took another slow breath, counting through to five before he gently released it through his nostrils. Distantly, he felt the breath brush through the mustache of his beard, but the effect was so dissociated with his form now that it was more like someone reading a story to him, a story about breathing.
He needed to think around the problem, Kane knew, find a way to operate the Commtact without affecting his command of the astrogation chair.
“Can you link me through to Grant?” Kane asked aloud, the beginnings of a plan forming in his mind.
* * *
FAR AWAY, in the control room of Shizuka’s lodge, Brewster Philboyd worked the communications tabs to connect Kane to Grant. Normally, Kane would be able to do this automatically, but with his mind being all but overwhelmed by the astrogator’s chair, the Cerberus ops crew knew he needed all the assistance that they could give.
“Putting you through now,” Brewster explained.
* * *
GRANT’S COMMTACT burst into life. He was clinging onto a swaying walkway that dangled over the sloshing pool of water at the time, and the voice surprised him as he gripped the narrow handrail with both hands.
“Grant? Where are you?”
The catwalk was hanging at an angle from the wall where it had once been mounted, its distant end clinging to that wall like a limpet. Grant clung to the ragged end of the walkway as it swayed to and fro over the rushing tides within the belly of Tiamat, his body arched so that his boots were still touching the forty-five-degree floor. Above him, Rosalia scrambled up the walkway, working hand-over-hand up the railing as she dragged herself back the way they had come.
