by James Axler
Kane was winning. Despite the unbelievable odds, he was winning.
Behind Kane, Ullikummis—whose form here seemed to be a hundred forms with a thousand names—struck a mighty punch, knocking Kane to the ground.
And not just to the ground—through it.
Kane cried out as he fell through another layer of the universe, rocketing through the unfamiliar angles of string space.
Chapter 16
It was like falling. His stomach dropped away from him and he felt that horrible sense of giddiness, the same feeling one got from flying within a dream. All around him, the ten thousand colors of god rushed past as if he were falling through a tunnel or a great winding tube. The colors flickered by faster, giving Kane the sensation that his speed was increasing.
Kane turned his head, trying to look up, but all he saw was the same thing, a great tunnel of color shooting toward him, as if he were falling into it, as if no matter which way he turned he was still falling. The angles were different here, Lakesh had told him; there were more angles than Kane had ever comprehended.
“The conceit of string theory, which has been further developed with superstring theory,” Lakesh had said, “holds that the component parts of reality are vast strings that oscillate so as to achieve a charge. That is the charge that we associate with neutrons, electrons and so on.”
“Cut the twenty-credit words,” Kane had replied as he stared at the towering forms of the Annunaki in superspace, “and just give me the summary.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Lakesh had replied over the Commtact with evident embarrassment. “I have been surrounded by physicists and quantum mechanics for too long.
“Superstrings exist in our world, and thus we see them. But they also exist in further dimensions. The very simplified version is that the string loops out behind the facade that we perceive. Each string has a different harmonic, and there had been much debate in the scientific community in the latter years of the twentieth century as to just how many aspects these strings have. Which is to say, how many dimensions they cross.”
“By dimensions,” Kane asked, “what are we talking? Alternate earths and nutty timelines?”
“No, Kane,” Lakesh said, barely concealing the laughter in his voice. “Length and breadth and depth are dimensions, the dimensions that we are familiar with in our world. Now you must imagine others. What your brain is seeing there—wherever there is—are the additional dimensions, ones we have no real means of comprehending.”
“How many dimensions are we talking about here, Lakesh?” Kane asked.
“Well, that’s a good question. Before the nukecaust occurred, there were a number of competing theories as to just how many dimensions were involved in any string theory,” Lakesh explained. “There were even suggestions in the 1990s that several of the popular superstring theories in fact interconnected, that they were each calculating just one aspect of the equation and that all could be joined to create a greater understanding—”
“How many?” Kane butted in impatiently.
“Ten is the base level that all superstring theory works from. Any less than that and the hypothesis would not function,” Lakesh explained. “But there have been numerous other theories that contest anywhere upward of twenty facets—or dimensions—to the strings.”
“So you don’t know for sure?” Kane queried.
“Kane, you must try to understand that this is the stuff of high-end theoretical physics. Superstring is one of those rarefied beasts—a theory of everything.”
“And I’m fighting in the middle of it,” Kane grumbled. “Good to know.”
Now Kane gritted his teeth as he continued to fall in whatever direction it was he was falling, discovering new angles as he was drawn deeper and deeper into the war of the Annunaki.
What it took was focus, he knew. If he could keep his sense of self, then the rest would follow, making reason from the chaos that he was staring into.
With a steadying breath, Kane closed his eyes and let the sensation of falling drift away, like spume on the ocean. He needed to get back to the battle, and to do that he needed to have a cast-iron sense of who he was fighting.
“Kane,” he muttered. “Kane.”
He could always leave them alone, let these two alien conquerors battle it out. If he did, there was a chance that one or other of them would die, but to do so would be handing the victor the metaphorical keys to Earth, with all those indoctrinated peoples just waiting to bow down before an alien master. No, Kane’s place was here, rushing across the angles, bringing his own brand of Magistrate justice to two pretender gods who thought they were better than humankind.
Kane opened his eyes, and he saw the world resolve around him, dark and foreboding. Everything was black now, the line of the horizon a multicolored slit in the far distance, a lone tree waiting there. Enlil and Ullikummis were gone, and Kane needed to find them.
He turned, searching the landscape with a frantic gaze. It was black, everything was black, as if all the color had been torn away. And there was nothing, just that distant horizon line waiting eerily in a thin band of multicolor.
“Grant,” Kane shouted, engaging his Commtact, “you want to maybe hurry things up at your end? I can’t take both of them on my own.” In fact, I can’t even see them, he added to himself.
* * *
“WE’RE ALMOST THERE,” Grant stated as he assessed his current situation. “Hang tight just a little longer.”
Aboard the spaceship Tiamat, he and Rosalia were hurrying along a corridor that had only a wall on one side. The other side ended in a sheer drop that overlooked a containment bay, eerily half-grown personnel ships waiting there like discarded abortions. The corridor itself was constructed of some kind of bone that had similar qualities to metal plate, and it was too narrow to fit three people abreast.
Up ahead, Grant spotted two more of the Annunaki warriors, their scales rippling in red and green as they hurried down the corridor to meet the intruders.
Grant raised the Sin Eater as he ran to them, swinging it in an abbreviated arc and snapping off a burst of fire at the enemy. Rosalia jogged several paces behind him, her dark ponytail bobbing up and down as she kept up with the long strides of the ex-Magistrate.
Nine millimetre slugs whizzed down the corridor, tearing chunks of flesh out of the red-scaled Annunaki before Grant reached him. Rosalia had been right, Grant realized; they were deteriorating. There could be no question of it now. An hour earlier, the Annunaki would have shrugged off his bullets with relative ease, but now the bullets were capable of cutting into their flesh in great swathes, hacking chunks from their armored skin.
As the two groups of antagonists met, Rosalia kicked out and to the side, her heel rebounding from low on the wall, sending her vaulting up into the air. At the same time as she leaped, Rosalia flicked her katana through a wide circle, causing it to meet with the green-skinned Annunaki as she sailed over his head. The Annunaki hissed in pain as the sword caught his shoulder, helplessly turning as the sword pulled him three feet across the narrow corridor.
Rosalia landed in a graceful two point at the very edge of the walkway, her left foot meeting the floor just before her right. The green skin was less lucky. Staggering back under the sword strike under one foot, he went over the edge of the deck. Rosalia gritted her teeth in a bitter smile as the Annunaki dropped over the side, screaming as he fell into the docking bay with its half-formed spaceships.
Grant, meanwhile, was trading blows with the red Annunaki, a female with a single vertical spine jutting from her scalp like a radio antenna. Grant used his weight to best advantage, slamming into the female as her body bled where his shots had struck just moments before. The Annunaki shrieked, a horrible sound in the stillness of the corridor, backing up under the force of Grant’s blow until she fell against the wall.
<
br /> Grant brought the Sin Eater up once more, depressing the trigger and blasting a stream of bullets into the alien’s shrieking face. Chunks of her face and skull spattered the wall behind as Grant blew her brains out.
Rosalia’s eyes met with Grant as he reloaded his blaster. “Fun being on the rush-rush, huh?” she said.
And then they were off again, hurrying through the unguarded doorway at the far end of the corridor and passing into a small room that contained Enlil’s monitoring equipment.
* * *
KANE WALKED across that dead landscape for a long time, wondering just what it was he was really looking at. It was almost entirely black before his eyes, and yet he got a definite sense of distance, the unwavering line of the horizon a multicolored band across his field of vision. Whatever the angles were, he was struggling to find Ullikummis or Enlil here.
After a while, Kane spotted something waiting on the horizon to his left, and he trudged toward it, one foot after the other. As he approached, he saw that the thing in question was the tree he had seen from high above, but it was unlike any tree he had ever seen before. The tree was drawn in thin lines, and each one contained the colors of the spectrum. It was as if the tree’s image had been carved on the eerie tableau of midnight black.
The tree featured a narrow trunk that reached straight into the air, and its branches stood at regular intervals along its side, the circles of its blossoms running up its sides and middle, with one more blossom poised at the apex of the trunk itself. The blossoms were spherical and, like the tree and the line of the distant horizon, each was multicolored, the colors shimmering and changing in a random pattern that seemed soothing.
Kane looked at it for a long while, wondering what to make of it. “Balam, can you see this?” he asked.
Disembodied, Balam’s voice came from very close. “I see what you see, Kane,” he confirmed. “However, I admit to being as mystified as you are.”
Kane stared at the tree, walking slowly around it, the sounds of distant wind charging across the
otherwise empty plane. There was nothing significant that he could see. The tree appeared the same from every angle, those ten clusters of blossoms arranged up and down its length.
Exasperated, Kane glanced up at the sky, searching for a hint of where the dueling Annunaki were. They had to be here somewhere, it stood to reason—after all, he had been drawn into this dimension by their touch. But there was nothing in the sky, just that simple black sheet identically reflecting the ground.
“Lakesh,” Kane said, “I need your input here. I’m lost.”
“What can you see?” Lakesh asked, his voice coming loud and clear through the Commtact.
“I’m in a characterless environment,” Kane summarized, “and the only thing here is a tree.”
“Can you describe it?”
Kane did, and he explained how everything else was simply black.
“I admit that—if you’ll forgive a little irony—I am stumped, my friend,” Lakesh said. “Many are the cultures that believe in a tree of life, but that is simply philosophy. Despite your spiritual quest, I can see no relation to what you are seeing there now.”
“But I’m not seeing it, am I?” Kane reminded him. “I’m seeing an interpretation of your string theory, right?”
“Well, now, Kane,” Lakesh sputtered, “it’s not my theory. Superstrings were first—”
“Tree,” Kane interrupted, reminding Lakesh to concentrate on the issue at hand. “What do I do?”
“I don’t know,” Lakesh admitted. “Climb it?”
“Sure, why not,” Kane groused and he grabbed hold of the lowest branch and began to pull himself up. “Nothing else to do ’round here.”
* * *
GRANT AND ROSALIA PACED warily through the monitoring room. The room had no source of light other than the strange displays themselves, which hung like mist in the air above the crescent-shaped databank.
Grant slowed, his eyes scanning each of the displays, their soft edges disappearing into nothingness. Several showed a feed from outside the ship’s hull, where the human army loyal to Ullikummis was fighting for survival against the reborn Annunaki. There, as aboard the ship, the Annunaki seemed to be struggling, their bodies failing them as the hideous combat continued amid streets created by the channels of bone.
Elsewhere among the feeds, Grant recognized the docking bay where he and Rosalia had entered, and next to that display he saw a figure he knew. It was Brigid Baptiste, her vibrant red hair unmistakable. She seemed to be standing in a midsize chamber with a stone item at its center. The stone thing was poised like an upright peanut, standing a little shorter than she was.
“There’s Brigid,” Grant said, pointing her out on the displays.
“What’s that she’s standing by?” Rosalia asked, bending to get a better look.
“Not sure,” Grant ruminated. “Looks kinda like an egg.”
Rosalia searched the monitoring room, looking for the door. There were two: one in the far wall, hidden behind a monitoring bank, the other a hatch set in the floor. “This way, I think,” she said, indicating the doorway in the wall.
“In a minute,” Grant said as his brown eyes scanned the feeds one last time, searching for anything that may help them, searching for Kane. One feed showed the waterlogged chamber, while another showed the engine room with its strange, hooded engineers scurrying about like rats. Then, after a moment Grant spotted Enlil on one of the mistlike windows, his body showing several new wounds.
“Enlil’s still alive, I see,” Grant grumbled.
He watched for a moment longer as Ullikummis appeared in frame, driving one of his heavy rock fists into the Annunaki overlord’s face and sending him sprawling to the floor. A stream of symbols flashed across the shimmering display, their precise meaning lost on Grant though they reminded him of the biolank data that the transponder beacons broadcast for Cerberus personnel. Now, if he could only make sense of those displays, he could perhaps figure out who was winning. Grant’s brow furrowed as he stared at the raindroplike displays, watching their colors flash and change. Then after a moment he shook his head in defeat.
“Screw it,” Grant muttered, striding across the control room to join Rosalia at the door.
Seconds later, the two of them were through the door and into another narrow corridor, this one with bulging walls like a flattened hexagon.
* * *
OUTSIDE TIAMAT’S hull, the rift at the edge of the city continued to disgorge more of the faithful human warriors. Already massively outnumbered, the Annunaki were dwindling now, frankly overwhelmed by the continued push of humans who had been indoctrinated into the cult of stone.
But something else was happening, too. Once powerful, the Annunaki bodies were failing, their near
invincibility showing signs of weakness with each successive strike.
Sela Sinclair was rushing at one of the lizardlike creatures in a street close to Tiamat’s starboard side. The Annunaki was a silver-fleshed female, with swollen breasts and flaring hips, and she fought with a sickle blade that cut the air with an angry whine. Sela watched as the Annunaki hacked another hooded human to pieces, chopping his body apart in a series of swift, brutal slashes.
Sela ran, blasting a shot from her Colt Mark IV at the silver Annunaki as she turned. The bullet struck the Annunaki in the collarbone, cutting a bloody gash through her shoulder. The Annunaki warrior reared back, reaching up for the fresh wound with her free hand.
Sela squeezed her trigger again, whipping another bullet at the Annunaki female. The Annunaki shrieked as the bullet struck, her shoulder erupting in a shower of blood and ruined muscle.
The Annunaki warrior dragged herself forward, lunging with the sickle to hack at Sela. Sela leaped back, dancing out of reach of that hideous blade as it cut through the
air, her pistol blasting yet again. The shot zipped through the narrow distance between them, burying itself in the Annunaki’s cheek even as a second slug drilled into her forehead. Sela watched in triumph as the Annunaki dropped the sickle from a grip gone suddenly limp, bumbling backward toward a bone wall.
Something terrible was happening to the Annunaki, Sela realized. Their bodies had been crafted from human DNA, leapfrogging the hybrid stage as Overlord Enlil tried to repopulate the Earth with his brethren. But those bodies had been possessed not by the downloaded minds of the Annunaki but by the living
memories of their slave caste, the Igigi. The perverted sum of the parts was something poisonous, creating something deadly to itself.
Sela fired again, her teeth gritted in deadly determination, and the Annunaki warrior went down, slumping to the ground in a bloody heap.
We can win, Sela realized. The humans could win.
* * *
IN THE LEAKING ROOMS and corridors of Tiamat herself, the clutch of remaining Annunaki were beginning to fail, their bodies rejecting the Igigi memories and simply giving up. Grant and Rosalia ran down the hexagonal corridor, watching in surprise as yet another Annunaki—the third they had seen—crashed to the deck, his eyes going pale as he lost the will to carry on. A genetic time bomb had finally reached detonation, sapping the will from their enemies.
“This suddenly got a lot easier,” Grant said, but he couldn’t hide the bitterness in his voice.
Rosalia laughed, a cruel, braying sound that echoed down the tunnellike expanse. “Told you so. Typical man—you never listen. Got to see everything with your own eyes.”
Behind them, the Annunaki was shaking violently as the life seemed to leak out of him, his body a mess of quivering armored flesh.
