CROSS FIRE OF THE IMMORTALS

The Annunaki, a power-hungry and hate-driven alien race, have returned to take over Earth. This time, permanently. And the hard-core human rebels who fought to repel these self-proclaimed gods have paid a terrible price. Just when they are needed most—as the postapocalyptic threat surges to terrifying new levels—the Cerberus operation lies broken, its key members missing.

PROGENY OF HATE

Ullikummis has chosen Earth as ground zero for a terrifying family reunion. A son born of cruelty, genetic manipulation and infinite power, for 4,000 years the stone god has waited, plotting his revenge against his father, Enlil, the most sadistic of the Annunaki. As father and child unleash their armies in a clash of titanic proportions, the bravest of the rebels, Kane, is humanity’s last hope to halt this deadly war of the gods. Endgame has finally arrived...but who will be the winner?

Another Annunaki was out there

The mother ship had detected his presence immediately, identified him as one of her children.

“Ullikummis,” Enlil muttered, the name lost in the sharp intake of his breath. “So you have returned, my son.”

It should have been impossible, Enlil knew. He had expelled his child into space, sent him to float among the stars for the duration of his near-endless life. And yet here he stood on Earth once again, and with an army of apekin at his beck and call.

But Enlil did not question the facts presented to him. Ullikummis had beaten the odds and returned, and that was only right because he was his son—and what would any son of Enlil be if he could not defy the odds?

Tapping a quick sequence out on the palm link to Tiamat, Enlil called forth the Igigi who hid within the shells of the reborn Annunaki. “We still have much to do.” He spoke to the empty room as if reminding himself. “More than I conceived. Let us begin.”

Tiamat trembled as her mighty cargo doors opened for the very first time.

God War

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

There is undoubtedly something religious about it: everyone believes that they are special, that they are chosen, that they have a special relationship with fate. Here is the test: you turn over card after card to see in which way that is true. If you can defy the odds, you may be saved. And when you are cleaned out, the last penny gone, you are enlightened at last, free perhaps, exhilarated like an ascetic by the falling away of the material world.

—Andrei Codrescu

1946–

The Road to Outlands—

From Secret Government Files to the Future

Almost two hundred years after the global holocaust, Kane, a former Magistrate of Cobaltville, often thought the world had been lucky to survive at all after a nuclear device detonated in the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C. The aftermath—forever known as skydark—reshaped continents and turned civilization into ashes.

Nearly depopulated, America became the Deathlands—poisoned by radiation, home to chaos and mutated life forms. Feudal rule reappeared in the form of baronies, while remote outposts clung to a brutish existence.

What eventually helped shape this wasteland were the redoubts, the secret preholocaust military installations with stores of weapons, and the home of gateways, the locational matter-transfer facilities. Some of the redoubts hid clues that had once fed wild theories of government cover-ups and alien visitations.

Rearmed from redoubt stockpiles, the barons consolidated their power and reclaimed technology for the villes. Their power, supported by some invisible authority, extended beyond their fortified walls to what was now called the Outlands. It was here that the rootstock of humanity survived, living with hellzones and chemical storms, hounded by Magistrates.

In the villes, rigid laws were enforced—to atone for the sins of the past and prepare the way for a better future. That was the barons’ public credo and their right-to-rule.

Kane, along with friend and fellow Magistrate Grant, had upheld that claim until a fateful Outlands expedition. A displaced piece of technology...a question to a keeper of the archives...a vague clue about alien masters—and their world shifted radically. Suddenly, Brigid Baptiste, the archivist, faced summary execution, and Grant a quick termination. For Kane there was forgiveness if he pledged his unquestioning allegiance to Baron Cobalt and his unknown masters and abandoned his friends.

But that allegiance would make him support a mysterious and alien power and deny loyalty and friends. Then what else was there?

Kane had been brought up solely to serve the ville. Brigid’s only link with her family was her mother’s red-gold hair, green eyes and supple form. Grant’s clues to his lineage were his ebony skin and powerful physique. But Domi, she of the white hair, was an Outlander pressed into sexual servitude in Cobaltville. She at least knew her roots and was a reminder to the exiles that the outcasts belonged in the human family.

Parents, friends, community—the very rootedness of humanity was denied. With no continuity, there was no forward momentum to the future. And that was the crux—when Kane began to wonder if there was a future.

For Kane, it wouldn’t do. So the only way was out—way, way out.

After their escape, they found shelter at the forgotten Cerberus redoubt headed by Lakesh, a scientist, Cobaltville’s head archivist, and secret opponent of the barons.

With their past turned into a lie, their future threatened, only one thing was left to give meaning to the outcasts. The hunger for freedom, the will to resist the hostile influences. And perhaps, by opposing, end them.

Special thanks to Rik Hoskin for his contribution to this work.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 1

It was a little after dawn in Luilekkerville on the West Coast of what used to be known as the United States of America. The morning air still fresh and cool against his face, Minister Morrow rubbed his hand over his clean-shaved jaw and looked up at the golden ball of the sun as it rose over the cathedral. Placed in the exact center of the ville, the cathedral towered over the buildings around it, dominating the skyline.

The ville itself had the air of a construction site, half-built edifices poised along the straight streets, as if patiently waiting in line for their builders to return after a good night’s sleep. So much had changed here since the days when this walled settlement had first grown up from the ashes of bombed-out Snakefishville. Back when it had been ruled by Baron Snakefish, the gates had been kept locked, the high walls patrolled by the Magistrates. Those were things of the past now. These days, under its new and hopeful name, Luilekkerville’s gates were ever open, the new Magistrates welcoming all visitors that they might perhaps join the congregation. Minister Morrow took heart in that, feeling in part responsible thanks to his imparting of firm moral guidance to the newcomers to the ville, encouraging the work ethic that had seen so much rebuilding over the ruins of the old.

A balding middle-aged man with ruddy cheeks and a square face, Morrow was dressed in his simple robes of office: a fustian cassock with a wide hood that could be pulled forward to hide his face in shadow. He was an Alpha, first priest in the New Order that had dedicated itself to a better world under the stone god who had returned from Heaven to spread his message of peace. The god’s name was Ullikummis, but that hardly mattered. What he brought—what he was even now in the process of bringing—was utopia, Heaven on Earth.

Human society had suffered more than two hundred years of blight, first with the nuclear conflict that launched the twenty-first century and wiped out billions in what seemed a determined effort at mutual destruction. Then came the Deathlands era, a hundred years of radioactive hell that only the strongest could survive, clawing their way through the debris as they struggled to reassert some measure of order on the chaos. And then, approximately one hundred years ago, the Program of Unification had finally restored order to the ruined United States in the form of nine settlements called villes, each one named after its baron, who served as its absolute ruler. But even these villes were far from utopian. Unknown to most citizens, their rulers were engaged in a strictly regimented purge of the past, obliterating the details of humankind’s advances prior to the nukecaust.

In their way, too, the villes were exclusive. Each housed a set number of individuals: five thousand aboveground, a further thousand in the Tartarus Pits at their lowest levels. Perimeter walls kept out the so-called outlanders, who were often viewed as dangerous in their nonconformity and many of whom were still affected by residual radiation from the nukecaust. If the baronies had been designed to provide some kind of respite, they had failed, ultimately sinking into chaos when the barons fled.

What Ullikummis and his adherents promised was a truly better tomorrow, a new society unlike anything seen before in the short history of humankind. What was more, the proof of this claim was already visible. The truly faithful, those blessed by the touch of Ullikummis himself, were able to channel his power, turning their flesh into something with the impenetrability of stone; Morrow had seen them in action. These people, the Stones, were the military arm of the new regime, the new Magistrates of the bright promised future.

As his ministerial robes billowed about him in the wind, Morrow stared at the towering structure of the cathedral. Its circular scarlet window dominated the spire like a cyclopean eye, and Morrow smiled. The future was here, so close he could taste it, smell it on the air.

His congregation was large, and even though the cathedral could seat more than eight hundred, it was frequently filled to brimming when he called the faithful to prayer. And not just with the people of the ville itself, but others, outlanders from the surrounding lands who came from near and far to pledge their commitment to the dream of a better world.

This day, however, Minister Morrow would have a special message to impart to his congregation. As he headed toward the always-open entrance to the towering cathedral, he saw the familiar figure waiting inside among the wooden pews. The man was in his late thirties and had the strong build of a farmer, his loose shirt buttoned low. His name was Christophe, and he was one of more than a hundred who had built the cathedral when Luilekkerville was just beginning to emerge from the debris of the old barony. These days,

Christophe helped Minister Morrow with the upkeep of the church, working as a handyman.

“Our love is a rock,” Christophe said by way of greeting.

In response, Minister Morrow nodded. “What brings you here so early, Christophe?”

“Woke up early,” Christophe told him. “Strange dreams, and then I couldn’t get back to sleep. There’s something coming,” he explained vaguely.

“I felt it, too,” the minister agreed.

“Then what should we do, Minister?” Christophe asked.

Morrow looked out across the interior of the vast, empty cathedral, its seats lined up in blocks, all of them facing the central dais, and he knew just what to do. “Ring the bell,” he told Christophe. “Call the faithful. Call them home.”

* * *

“GOOD MORNING, Haight.”

Brigid Haight opened her eyes, the last whispers of the dream leaving her in that familiar whirl of colors, blue, gold and green. Across from the simple cot that she slept in—its bedding made up of an untidy blanket rolled in on itself beneath her head to provide some form of pillow—waited the great giant Ullikummis, her lord and master. He stood eight feet tall, his body formed of rock dark as mud with a weather-beaten look to it that made one think of the ocean batting against cliffs. Veins of magma hurried between the plates of his chest and along the joints of his arms and legs, their orange glow shimmering in the dark room like the ebbing rays of sunset. His tree-trunk-like legs ended in two flaring stumps, the feet long since hacked away in a vicious battle with his uncle, Enki. His body was unclothed, for he needed none. Indeed, he simply was, needing no adornments for his powerful form. Pointing struts reached up from his shoulder blades, forming twin ridges like the horns of a stag, mismatched and pointing inward toward his head in great scything curves. The head itself seemed ugly, misshapen, its ridges hard and uneven. Formed of rock like the rest of him, Ullikummis’s was the face of nightmare, dark stone eroded by weather rather than carved with the delicacy of a statue. A slash of mouth waited grimly beneath a flattened nose, twin eyes burning with magma like pits beneath a thick brow. Humanoid in form, the creature known as Ullikummis was entirely hairless.

He stood in the doorway, the familiar charcoallike muster of his body wafting to Brigid’s nostrils as he waited there, so tall he dominated the room before he had fully entered. A child stood before him, a girl no more than three years old, her long, wispy hair reaching midway down her back in feathery waves of a blond so pale it was almost white. She wore a simple dress, its creamy yellow somehow enhancing the paleness of her skin. The girl was called Quavell or Quav, named after her mother, and she was a hybrid of human and alien DNA. But Ullikummis called her only by her true name, the name of the programmed template hidden within her genetic code—Ninlil, the name of his mother. He stood now with his stone-clad hands resting gently on the girl’s shoulders, protective, possessive.

Seeing Brigid’s confusion, Ullikummis spoke again, his voice rumbling like the grinding stones of a mill. “You seem ill at ease, my hand in darkness.”

Brigid shook her head momentarily, willing the feeling of sleep from her body. “I dreamed of shapes...” she muttered, “colors.” Her words seemed confused, as if she was trying to describe a thing just out of sight.

She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, with porcelain skin and vibrant red hair that ran down her back in a cascade of tangled curls. Twin emerald orbs peered from beneath dark makeup that had been smeared like a black shadow across her eyes. Her full lips were darkened to the harsh purple of a bruise, and her cheeks seemed narrow and drawn. While those full lips invoked a tender, sultry side, her high forehead hinted at her formidable intelligence. Brigid pushed the blanket away from her naked body, revealing the trim, slender form of a trained athlete, strong but remaining enviably feminine.

They were inside a sea fortress off the East Coast of North America. The fortress had been named Bensalem by its originator Ullikummis, who had drawn it alone from the depths of the ocean stone by stone, shaping it with the power of his formidable will the way a sculptress might carve a pot. The placement of the fortress had been paramount, sitting atop a hidden parallax point—one of a network of nodes across the globe that served to function as access points for a teleportational system.

Brigid’s room itself was small and cold with a narrow opening in its stone wall that served as a window. Through this, she could hear the waves crashing against the high stone sides of the island fortress, feel the billowing breeze from the ocean and smell its briny aroma as the sun rose. The walls of the room were hard rock, rough and unfinished as if a cliff face had been sheared away. Embedded within those walls, faint lines of

orange-red glowed in jagged rents, each no wider than half an inch and splayed across the walls like the shards of a shattered windshield. Throbbing and pulsing, those orange rents seemed uncannily alive.

As Brigid shrugged aside her covers, feeling the cold dawn air on her skin, Ullikummis spoke again in that voice like grinding millstones. “The stars are aligned,” he said. “The day is upon us.”

Her body revealed, there were bruises there, too, circles in the deepest purples and blues as if her mouth had been made up in sympathy. The white-blond girl, Little Quav, trotted across the room to Brigid as she pulled herself from the bunk, an innocent smile in her eyes. The girl tottered a little, neither walking nor running but instead a kind of combination of the two as she hurried over to Brigid’s arms. “Brigly,” she said, excitement in her voice.

Brigid held her arms open, encircling the girl as she sat at the edge of the bunk. The hybrid girl felt warm as she pressed against Brigid’s breasts.

“Good morning, munchkin,” Brigid said. The epithet seemed strange to her, distant, like something made of mist.

The girl had been with them for six days now. Though fearless, she had cast Brigid as a mother figure in the echoing stone fortress. That was only natural; to an extent, Brigid had been a mother to her since her birth almost three years earlier. Little Quav’s hybrid mother had died shortly after childbirth, leaving the child orphaned. A key player in the genetic arms race between humans and Annunaki, Quav had been in danger from the very moment of her birth. For her own safety, the hybrid child was entrusted into the foster care of Balam, the last of a race known as the First Folk. For the past few years, Balam had raised the child as his own in the abandoned city of Agartha, hidden deep beneath the Altyn Tagh region of Tibet. However, as she had become older and hence more self-aware, the outwardly human Quav had begun to question the obvious differences between herself and her foster father. She had delighted in the few contacts she had had with people, understandably feeling a kind of instant kinship with them after her time with Balam. Brigid had been one of those people; she and Quav had met on brief occasions where the girl had formed her attachment. Haight had been known by another name then, however—her birth name of Brigid Baptiste, and she had worked for the Cerberus organization tasked with the protection of humanity from the alien machinations of the insidious race called the Annunaki.

The Annunaki were a race of aliens who had first visited Earth many millennia ago, back when humankind was still hiding in trees from saber-toothed tigers. With their strange, reptilian appearance and incredible technology, the Annunaki had been mistaken for gods by the primitive local populace, an error that they had reveled in, encouraging their worship as false idols, and they constructed their vast golden cities of Eridu, Nippur, Babylon and others on the virgin soils of Earth. Though hailed in Sumerian mythology as gods, the Annunaki themselves were in fact a near-immortal race from the planet Nibiru, whose group memories were passed on—complete—to their descendants and the others of their race. By the time they arrived on Earth, the Annunaki had become bored with their lives, gripped by a self-destructive ennui engendered by the nature of their vast shared memories. With no individual experience in living memory, it was hoped that the conquering of this new planet would stave off the crushing boredom of their lives—and for a time it had. Here were new territories to control, new creatures to toy with and experiment on. For a while, the gods had warred, battling for territory, for supremacy, for the adulation of the primitives that littered the planet all about them. But finally—perhaps, inevitably—they had become bored with their new playthings, and Overlord Enlil, the cruelest of their number and the master of the city of Nippur, had unleashed a great torrent to wipe the planet of the scourge of humankind like a spoiled child tossing aside his toys. This torrent had been enshrined in man’s history under various names, most notably as the Great Flood of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Enlil’s plot failed thanks to the deceptions of his own brother, Enki, and the Great Flood did not wipe humankind from the face of the planet. Thus, while the Annunaki retreated into the shadows, humanity flourished. For the subsequent four thousand years, humanity reigned until, on January 20, 2001, a devastating nuclear holocaust had been unleashed by the antagonistic powers of East and West. This war, and the subsequent Deathlands era of privation that followed, had in fact been part of a long-term plan by the Annunaki to reassert their own dominance over the indigenous race, thinning the herd before reemerging two hundred years after the nukecaust to finally take their place as rulers of the world. That audacious plan had involved the creation of artificially evolved bodies in the forms of the hybrid barons, of whom Little Quav was the ultimate progeny. Each of these hybrids had been prepped to accept a genetic download from the starship Tiamat, literally a mother ship for the Annunaki.

However, once the nine barons had been reborn in their original, lizardlike forms as the royal family of the Annunaki, old rivalries and prejudices had rapidly emerged, and the nine overlords were soon at war with one another for ultimate control of the territories once more. Stuck between the factions, a plucky group of human adventurers working together under the banner of Cerberus managed to turn the Annunaki’s plans back on themselves, destroying their mother ship and leaving the various overlords for dead.

Or so it had appeared.

Over recent months, several Annunaki had reappeared, including Enlil and the mad goddess called variously Lilitu, Lilith or Ezili Coeur Noir. Nearly ruined by the destruction of their womb ship, each of these old gods had struggled to gain a new foothold on the power they all craved. However, unknown to the Annunaki, things had become more complicated than they realized when Ullikummis, errant son of Overlord Enlil, had returned to Earth after a four-and-a-half-thousand-year exile.

Far from being a typical Annunaki, Ullikummis was a genetic freak whose DNA had been twisted beyond recognition at his father’s behest, turning him into a monster even among his own people. Heartless in the execution of his plan, Ullikummis’s father, the Overlord Enlil, had altered his son to become an assassin, a slayer of gods. Enlil had called the child his hand in darkness and sent him on a mission to destroy Teshub and gain the operational codes for Tiamat with which he might preside over the Annunaki. But the plan had backfired, and Ullikummis—along with his tutor, the disease-

ridden Upelluri—had been ambushed by Enlil’s brother, Enki. That brutal exchange had resulted in Ullikummis losing both feet at the keen edge of Enki’s sword and subsequently being disowned by his father, imprisoned in an asteroid and exiled into space. A by-blow child of rape, two contentions had driven Ullikummis to survive through the long period of his exile—that his father had orchestrated his downfall for his own insidious needs, and that his mother, Ninlil, was an innocent in need of rescue from this monster.

Now Ninlil’s genetic code was contained within the child known as Little Quav, whom Brigid Haight had enticed from Balam’s protection in the buried city of Agartha just six days earlier. The child seemed remarkably human, inquisitive and often finding pleasure in her own thoughts. Raised by Balam in the abandoned city, it was only natural that she should find joy in her own company, and Brigid had watched her at play in the cold, cavernous corridors of Fort Bensalem. The child would make a plaything of whatever came to hand, giving stones and material personalities and little voices when she thought no one was looking, frequently making up songs that she would sing to herself, endless loops of rhyming noises that—as often as not—were not words at all.

Although the child looked automatically to Brigid for compassion and comfort, she expressed no fear of Ullikummis, in spite of his monstrous appearance. Seeing the two of them together made for an incongruous sight: the girl not yet three feet in height with the tiny, birdlike build of the hybrids, while he was eight feet tall and as solid as living stone. Brigid had been surprised to see that, despite his appearance and eminent practicality, Ullikummis was capable of tenderness. He befriended the child by honoring her, the way a child will honor a parent, a man or a god.

In the curtailed week that Quav had spent at the rock-walled fortress, Ullikummis had lavished long hours speaking with her, patiently explaining her role in the Annunaki royal family, her destiny and importance to his own plans. He had done this both as a teacher and a friend, never once berating the young child for her impatience or because her attention span did not equal his.

Ullikummis was exceptionally patient, Brigid had observed as he conversed with the child, something she had not really credited before now. She had first met Ullikummis in her other life, when she had been a Cerberus warrior opposed to all things Annunaki. Ullikummis had returned to Earth in his space prison, landing in the wilds of Canada, and he had immediately set about building his own army within the structure he called Tenth City. While he was monstrous and harsh in his manner, looking back Brigid realized he had never been impatient. Even as he suffered an attack and seemingly ignoble defeat, Ullikummis himself had simply stepped back, hiding himself in the shadows and letting the Cerberus warriors see what they wanted to see, believing him killed in an incinerator explosion. At heart he was an assassin, his father’s one-time hand in darkness, and so his natural inclination was to step back, to merge with the shadows and let the world turn around him while things ran their course, secure in the knowledge he could strike when the time was right.

Brigid’s second meeting with Ullikummis had come in the Ontic Library, an undersea storeroom that housed the blueprints to reality itself. Ullikummis had accessed the library to amass more knowledge about his father from its sentient datastream, but his brutal incursion had damaged the structures of the library itself. Brigid had joined her then-colleagues from Cerberus in expelling Ullikummis from the incredible library before the damage proved irrevocable, and it had been her consciousness that had been melded with the living data to shore up the library’s defenses. Ullikummis had encountered her then, their astral forms meeting, but his perception had been so altered by the library that he had been unable to recognize her. It was only later, once the Annunaki prince was freed from the datastream, that he had realized who it was he had come in touch with—and he had decided at that moment that he needed to recruit this fearsome intellect for his own cause, lest she prove his downfall.

Ullikummis enacted a bold plan against Cerberus shortly thereafter, amassing his nascent army to attack and overwhelm their hidden base in the Bitterroot Mountains. Ullikummis had left the task of running the overthrown base in the hands of his first priest, a man called Dylan, whose primary job was to turn Brigid’s partner, Kane, into a military leader for his stone army. Dylan had failed, and Kane had turned on him and overthrown the briefly victorious regime of his enemies. But Ullikummis himself had already exited the redoubt with Brigid, bringing her to Bensalem, where he had brainwashed and reconstructed her mind for his own means. Brigid, an eminently capable woman of fearsome intellect, had tried to resist, but ultimately her personality had been broken down and remade in the form of her new self, Brigid Haight. Now Haight was Ullikummis’s new first priest, his so-called hand in darkness, as he had been for his father. And with her help, Ullikummis would bring about the next reign of the mighty Annunaki, an era over which he and Ninlil would preside.

Outside, through the open window of the rock-walled room, Brigid perceived the rays of the early-morning sun playing across the ever-changing ocean surface. It was barely dawn, the night chill still clinging heavily in the air. Gently pushing aside Little Quav, Brigid reached for the clothes that were draped over the stone chair at the end of her bed. Like everything else in Bensalem, the chair was constructed of rock and had a rough, weather-beaten look to it. As she took her single garment from the seat, two doglike creatures came wandering past the open door. They were huge, the size of lions with that same grace and majesty. Their bodies were rough, coated in a living stone that seemed to match the walls and the furniture of the room. One stared into the room for a moment, its nose in the air, and Brigid saw that it had eyes that looked sad and unmistakably human. She pushed the thought from her mind as she stepped into the leather leggings of the catsuit.

In a few moments, Brigid closed the front of the formfitting black leather suit she favored, stretching her arms out before her to affix its sleeves in place. The suit clung to her supple curves like a second skin, reflecting the faint red glow that emanated from the roiling veins in the walls. Now dressed, Brigid bent to retrieve the heavy fur cloak that she had tossed to the floor before retiring the previous evening, pulling it over her shoulders. Then, cinching the ties on the cloak, she stared across the room once more to Ullikummis, who waited in the doorway like some rudimentary statue from a primitive culture.

Meeting his hellish eyes, Brigid repeated Ullikummis’s words back to him. “The stars are aligned,” she said, knowing full well what it meant. “Thus it’s time.”

With a single nod, Ullikummis turned and left the room, his footsteps like pounding jackhammer blows on the hard stone floor. Little Quav remained in the middle of the room, abandoned and looking to Brigid for direction. The red-haired woman called Haight reached her hand down to take that of the hybrid girl’s.

“Come on, little one,” she said. “Time to meet with destiny.”

Together, Brigid and Quav followed Ullikummis through the cool, echoing corridors of the rocky fortress in some perversion of the family unit, the stone hounds trotting along at their sides like the family dogs. It was the closest Little Quav had ever known in her short life to being a part of a real family.

* * *

THE THRONE ROOM was as simple as Brigid’s living quarters, albeit larger. There were few decorations on the rough stone walls, just patterns on the rocks like veins on a leaf, along with two thick, moth-eaten curtains that had been used to partition lesser sections of the room. The windows were open, as no glass existed in the fortress island of Bensalem. Several of the windows were narrow slits, while one was wider, a circular hole in the wall behind the rock throne itself. The throne was massive, and sturdy enough to accommodate the hulking body of Ullikummis. He sat there now, his magma eyes pulsing. Two of his faithful hounds curled around the throne, their rough stone bodies melding together in the half-light of the room.

Brigid entered with Quav at her side, her pace slower than normal in deference to the girl’s shorter legs. She looked across the room to where the raised platform waited. This was the parallax point, a key site in a network of linked locations that could be accessed via a teleportational device called an interphaser. The interphasers worked by accessing these naturally occurring hyperdimensional vortices, which could be found all over the world and beyond. Interphasers then opened a quantum window between the two points, allowing their users to step through the gateway to a place that may be a thousand miles or more away. While eminently adaptable, interphasers were limited in the points they could access, although Ullikummis had tapped them in a different manner to that seen before. By applying knowledge he had retrieved from the Ontic Library, that undersea storehouse of the rules governing reality, Ullikummis could fold space during the interphase jump, subtly shifting his destination point and transferring whole armies to specific places. It was through this technique that his attack on the Cerberus redoubt had been so successful two months earlier. Once the interphaser was activated, the journey itself was instantaneous and would be over in the blink of an eye.

The parallax point itself, like the rest of the room, was carved of simple rock, seemingly not shaped by hand but by the elements themselves. It stood two feet higher than the floor of the room, with twin circles marked out on its surface concentrically. The circles were carved channels no deeper than a knuckle joint, the widest of them reaching out to just a foot before the edge of the platform itself.

Ullikummis was concentrating now, reknitting the pathways so that he could utilize the interphase gateway in a subtly different way. Brigid watched as his bright eyes dimmed, his thoughts turning within himself.

“Come on, child,” Brigid whispered to Quav, keeping her voice low. “We need to be ready for when the time comes.”

Quav clung to Brigid’s hand as the flame-haired woman led her to the dais, helping the hybrid girl up over the low step. Then, instructing the girl to remain in place, Brigid strode from the platform to an area that was masked behind one of the thick velvet curtains. She pushed the drape back, stone rings holding it in place on a stone strut that ran from wall to wall.

Behind the curtain lay a series of shelves like a bookcase, each one constructed from the same rough stone as the rest of the nightmarish sea palace. There were weapons arrayed on the upper shelves: a heavy mace constructed of stone, a leather bag filled with throwing stones, a TP-9 semiautomatic pistol with several clips of bullets.

Brigid plucked up the semiautomatic, her favored weapon when entering a combat situation, checking its breech before loading a new magazine and securing the extras in a pocket sewn into the lining of her cloak. The TP-9 was a compact but bulky pistol with a covered targeting scope across the top, all finished in molded matte black. The grip was set just off center beneath the barrel, and in the user’s hand, the unit appeared to form a lopsided square, hand and wrist making the final side and corner. Satisfied, Brigid shoved the pistol into a hip holster, twisting it slightly to secure it.

Then Brigid crouched, reaching for one of two objects that waited on the lowest shelf of the wall unit, resting on the floor. The two items were identical in design, and it was impossible to tell them apart. Pyramidal in shape, the items stood twelve inches from apex to square base, and each side of the base measured twelve inches in length. The sides were plated in a shimmering mirrored metal, its surface curved randomly so as to reflect in a strange, almost disconcerting way. These were the interphasers, the teleportational units that could be used to access a parallax point and transfer a person or persons across the quantum ether.

Gingerly, Brigid picked up the unit to the right and carried it in both hands to the platform where Little Quav was waiting. Kneeling for a moment, she flipped open a hidden door at the base of the pyramid-shaped machine, and her slender fingers traced a quick tattoo across the control buttons revealed within. The interphaser bleeped a moment, chirruping to itself as it accessed the cosmic pathways that would be used for this journey outside of traditional space.

Brigid stepped back as the interphaser began its automated ignition sequence, reaching for Quav’s hand as the unit came to life.

In his throne, Ullikummis dropped out of the meditative state he had been in, his eyes resuming their fearsome glow like the lighting of a fire.

“The final sequence begins,” he stated, the words rumbling through the throne room like distant thunder. “The endgame has arrived.”

The three-year-old child known as Quav grasped Brigid’s hand, squeezing it tighter as Ullikummis—genetically her son from four millennia before—drew himself out of the throne and strode across the room toward the raised platform containing the parallax point. Around them, the interphaser seemed to be splitting apart, a cone of many colors launching all around it, widening as it clambered upward through the room and, nonsensically, mirroring this action deep into the floor, the sight replacing the stone tiles there. Witchfire crackled within that dark swirl of colors, firing across its depths like lightning.

“I am the bringer of death,” Ullikummis chanted, “the destroyer of souls, the alpha and the omega, the vanishing point. I am the Godkiller.”

With those words, Ullikummis stepped onto the raised platform, the dogs trotting obediently along at his heels as he joined Brigid Haight and the girl who would be Ninlil amid the glowing quantum portal of the interphaser. The jump had begun.

* * *

THE CATHEDRAL BELL was chiming in Luilekkerville, a continuous droning clang pressing against the silence. Inside, the cathedral was packed. Almost one thousand individuals had crammed themselves within its confines, listening to the bell’s droning as Minister Morrow strode proudly among them, a broad, toothy grin on his heavily jowled face. Many of the congregation had seats but some were forced to stand, piling in through several doorways where the shadow of a man—elongated and alien—stretched into the aisle beyond through some quirk of the architecture. Every last building in the ville had emptied, disgorging its occupants, young or old, to attend this special service.

“Alone we were weak, lost, we were victims,” Morrow intoned as he strode up to the cathedral’s central plinth. “Alone we were afraid. Those who grew up here, who witnessed the fall of Snakefish, will recall the feelings of real fear that gripped them as their world collapsed about their ears.”

There were voices of assent from the congregation, calls of support and a hubbub of agreement from farther back among the swilling crowds.

“But together,” Minister Morrow called, thrusting his clenched right fist in the air above his head where everyone could see, “together we are strong. Together we cannot be defeated. Together we are the heralds of the glorious future, together we are the heralds of god.

“Each one of you here today is my brother, my sister,” Morrow continued. “Each one of you is a part of the future body, each one of you a building block for eternity.

“We are strong because we are stone!” Morrow shouted, opening the fist he held straight above his head. Revealed within, a rock rested on his palm, just three inches across and dark as a shadow. As the congregation cheered and whooped their support, the rock began to glow, at first faintly in a soft peachy orange, before rapidly becoming brighter until it was burning a lustrous red as rich as lava.

“We are stone,” Morrow chanted, and the people of the congregation took up the chant, shouting their allegiance to the glorious future of Ullikummis.

In Morrow’s hand, the stone glowed brighter still, illuminating the altar where the minister stood, painting his simple robes in rich scarlet and vermilion.

“We are stone,” Morrow called, and a thousand voices echoed the same words back to him. “We are stone.”

As the voices became louder, calling in time with the chiming bell, the air began to change above the minister’s head, poised as he was at the very center of the towering structure. The air seemed to take on a tangibility as a swirl of color began to form, small and faint at first but unmistakably present all the same.

The congregation continued to chant as the swirl above the minister grew bigger and more pronounced. The colors pulsed and swirled, dancing with one another like the aurora borealis, changing as they swam in the air. And somewhere deep in the midst of that multihued pattern, pencil-thin fingers of lightning began to crackle and flash.

Morrow continued to chant, his open hand raised in the air, brandishing the glowing stone like Prometheus bringing fire from the gods. The stone felt hotter now, not burning but like the feel of another person’s skin, lover to lover.

“I am stone.”

The crowd continued to repeat the phrase over and over as the wormhole opened behind their leader, widening like a circular window into the quantum ether.

Unknown to the congregation, all across the country, dozens more of the wormholes were opening as the faithful were called by Ullikummis, a widely scattered flock of believers called into service by their savior.

In Luilekkerville, the hole in space was as tall as a house now, taking up two stories of the cathedral’s innards, poised like a disk in the center of the massive enclosed space, like an eye looking into the infinite. The colors swirled and clashed and witchfire flashed across its depths, the call of Ullikummis echoing from the infinity rent to tug at the souls of the chanting congregation.

Suddenly, Morrow turned to face the expanding circular disk, seeing it properly for the first time where it swirled behind him. His lips continued to mouth the chant—“We are stone”—but the sound died before it left his throat, snatched away by the swirling elemental forces that he was staring into. Minister Morrow looked into the abyss, his human eyes trying to make sense of the fractal patterns of the quantum ether, as he led his congregation into its shining depths. The disk looked like a bruise, blacks and purples and indigo blues all mixing together as it grew larger and larger, a hundred other shades swirling within its tesseract depths.

And if the end of the world had a color, then this was it.

Chapter 2

The spaceship Tiamat was crumbling about them, chunks of its wall plating fracturing away, dropping into the ankle-deep water that seemed to fill every passageway. A man and woman were racing through the curving artery that ran in a loop at the exterior wall of the ship’s hull, and the man carried another figure in his muscular arms. He was much larger than the woman in his arms, and he made the task of carrying her seem effortless as he and his companion sought the makeshift entryway they had blasted in the ship’s hull just a few hours earlier.

Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville who now served the Cerberus operation. He was a huge man in his late thirties, wide-shouldered with skin like polished mahogany. His head was shaved clean, and he wore a trim goatee beard that surrounded his broad mouth in a black circle. His clothes were in disarray, as were those of his companions, and his heavy boots splashed in the water as he leaped over the riblike protrusions that lined the circular-walled corridor. Grant wore a long coat over his shadow suit, both of them made of black fabric, the former fabricated from a Kevlar weave. The shadow suit boasted remarkable properties. Snugly fitting its wearer like a second skin, the one-piece garment had armorlike features sufficient to deflect a blade, redistribute kinetic shock and offer protection from environmental hazards.

Grant continued to run, ducking as another chunk of the walls tumbled away in a crash of shell-like material. “Keep moving,” he instructed his companion, though the command was unnecessary. Perhaps he was really talking to himself, driving himself on as they both hurried toward the rent in the hull through which they might escape this nightmare.

Running just a few paces behind Grant was his companion, a beautiful woman with olive skin and long dark hair that swung behind her in a ponytail. In her early twenties, Rosalia was a mercenary who had recently hooked up with the Cerberus organization during the ongoing Ullikummis infiltration. She had tucked the cuffs of her combat pants into the supple leather boots she wore, kicking out with long legs to keep pace with her taller companion. Her open denim jacket showed the shadow suit she wore beneath, and she had a Ruger P-85 pistol stashed in a low-slung holster on her right hip and a katana sword tucked through her belt loop across the opposing hip. The sword was two feet in length, and the blade had been blackened by flames to the color of charcoal. Rosalia’s chest rose and fell as she took deep breaths to keep up with Grant’s long strides, and her deep brown eyes seemed to burn with rage.

Grant carried another woman in his arms, her petite frame much smaller than Rosalia’s. Her name was Domi and she was an albino, her skin a deathly white, her short hair the creamy color of bone where it framed her sharp-planed face in a pixie cut. Right now her pale flesh was marred with streaks of black where ash had smeared across her skin, and her eyes were closed in slumber. Open, those eyes were a vibrant, satanic red, like two pure rubies. Domi wore simple combat clothes in dark colors, but the clothes had been torn in places following a recent struggle.

As the group reached sight of the hole in the hull of the crumbling spaceship, Grant heard someone calling to him. Up ahead, he saw the familiar form of their other companion—a modern-day samurai warrior called Kudo, who was dressed in supple armor and had a long sword sheath depending from his belt. Kudo was one of the Tigers of Heaven, a group of fearsome warriors who had joined forces with the Cerberus exiles as they defended themselves from the hostile campaign by Ullikummis.

As Grant and Rosalia got closer, they saw that Kudo’s face was streaked red across the left-hand side where something had marred and puckered the skin, and the white of his left eye had turned a chilling bloodred. His dark hair was plastered to his head in short, wet curls.

“What happened to you?” Grant asked as they made their way together to the hole in the ruined hull.

“I mistimed the charge,” Kudo explained wryly before asking about his missing partner, Kishiro.

“He didn’t make it,” Grant admitted solemnly as he ducked through the door-sized hole that an explosive charge had left in the ship’s outer hull.

The ship was grounded. In fact, it had never flown, at least not in its current form. An Annunaki starship of legendary repute, Tiamat had been mistakenly identified in ancient Sumerian mythology as the mother to the Annunaki race of space gods. More accurately, she was a mother ship, an organic machine that housed the genetic templates of the Annunaki. She had returned to Earth’s orbit several years ago at the start of the twenty-third century, downloading the genetic codes that brought about the Annunaki royal family’s rebirth from their cocoonlike shells as the nine hybrid barons, but had later self-destructed in an explosion that rocked the skies. Grant had been there when the destruct order had been given, and he had watched from the porthole of a fleeing lifeboat as Tiamat went up in flames.

However, the spacecraft had reappeared just a few weeks before on the banks of the River Euphrates, Iraq, her familiar dragon shape towering over an empty city formed of her skeletal wings. Grant had no possible way of knowing, but the ship had been grown from a seed planted by Enlil, the cruelest of the Annunaki overlords. Enlil had tapped the ship’s incredible reservoir of knowledge to fast-track an army of Annunaki, warping the DNA of any human who came close to the skeletal city. However, something had been wrong deep within the codes of Tiamat herself, and the ship was now deteriorating at an incredible rate, falling apart as its huge water tanks bled out.

Outside, the sun sat high in the sky, its midmorning burn pounding warmly against Grant’s skin.

“We should destroy it,” Kudo insisted, staring angrily back at the shovel-shaped head of the spaceship that rested on the riverbank.

“We don’t have anything that can do that,” Grant told him as Rosalia emerged from the raw-edged hole in the hull, “but we can come back. Bomb the wicked thing out of existence once and for all.”

* * *

DEEP INSIDE the dragon-form ship, deep in the belly of the beast, Enlil was fighting for his life.

Enlil, a high-ranking member of Annunaki royalty, and self-styled overlord of the human race, was a beautiful creature. He stood over six feet tall, with a crest of spines atop his head that added almost a foot to his already impressive height. His scaled skin was the color of gold dipped in blood, of sunset in the tropics, and it covered his muscular body like a suit of malleable armor. His chest and arms were bare, as were his clawed feet, while his legs were covered in loose, billowing breeks. Other than that, Enlil wore a bloodred cloak cinched around his shoulders that trailed down to brush at the tops of his ankles. The cloak was torn, for it had suffered during the current struggle with his enemies.

His enemies were even now swarming at him from all sides, like a cloud of insects attacking an intruder. Naked, it was clear that each of them came from the same race as Enlil, their muscular lizard bodies moving with the same eerie grace that characterized the overlord’s gestures. They were adult Annunaki, full-grown yet they had only just come to life. The experiment engineered by Overlord Enlil had backfired terribly in the final moments thanks to the intervention of the Cerberus crew. The Annunaki had been grown in the vats of Tiamat, twisted around the DNA templates of trapped human bodies to create a new pantheon of Annunaki space gods. Even now, their egglike birthing pods stood silently around the scene of carnage, lining the sides of the vast room where streams of water burbled and catwalks grown from bone ran overhead.

Ill lit, the room was approximately the size of two football fields, with railless stairwells dotted around, each reaching up to the second level where the catwalks ran. To one side, a burning column belched smoke into the vast room, spewing out lightninglike shards of electricity toward the arched ceiling high above, illuminating the room in violent staccato bursts. Swathes of the roof were falling away in great chunks, crashing to the floor in explosions of dust and water.

And amid all of this, Enlil was struggling with the reborn forms of the Annunaki. There were 213 of them in all. Each one was unique, some male, some female, their scales a rainbow of achingly beautiful colors shimmering in the half-light that ebbed through the birthing chamber. Some had spines across their brows like Enlil’s, while others featured a crown of bony protrusions around their skulls.

Believing himself to be the last survivor of his race, Enlil had grown these bodies to re-create the glory of the Age of the Annunaki, who had ruled the Earth more than five thousand years before. Prior to Enlil’s experimentation, the rebirth of the Annunaki had involved a slow procedure of growing hybrid bodies that could accommodate the genetic changes needed to transform, chrysalis-like, into their Annunaki final form. Enlil had altered that, utilizing a much quicker—though far more traumatic—process to skip a step and change the basic human template into one suitable for the Annunaki. His plans had been interrupted by Grant, Domi, Rosalia and Kudo, and the waiting bodies had been awoken too soon, their memory downloads incomplete. In place of the memories of his brethren, Enlil found that an unexpected third party had been at play, prepped to snatch the bodies for their own. This group were the Igigi, the one-time slave caste of the Annunaki who were recorded in legend as “those who watch and see.” Without doubt, the Igigi had “watched and seen” the moment to finally strike against their one-time master.

According to Sumerian myth, there had been one thousand Igigi who served the Annunaki, and each one was considered to be a god by the human populace. However, their role had been to facilitate the day-to-day running of the Annunaki empire on Earth, and they had never achieved names. When Enlil had unleashed the Great Flood to cleanse the Earth of the human race, he had dismissed the Igigi, leaving them to drown as nothing more than collateral damage. But a group of rebellious Igigi had been wise to his plan and had hidden their memories in a shadow box until such time as they had bodies that could house them once more. When Enlil had generated this new army of Annunaki gods, the Igigi had seized their chance and now their souls occupied the Annunaki shells in place of the planned downloads. Now 213 fiercely powerful bodies had turned on the Annunaki overlord who had tried to extinguish them many millennia ago—213 angry souls.

Enlil had been knocked down to the floor by their vicious attacks, and more of the Igigi-possessed

Annunaki swarmed on him, kicking and punching him from all sides as he lay on his back. A mound of bodies pressed against him, crushing Enlil to the floor by the sheer weight of numbers. At the bottom of that mound, Enlil was struggling for breath as five or six strong Annunaki bodies crushed against his chest, clawed hands grasping for his throat, reaching for his eyes.

Then, with an almighty effort, Enlil flinched his body, sharp and sudden, and three of the monstrous forms were thrust away from him, careering into the canal streams that filtered across the room.

Enlil shoved upward with both hands, pushing two more of the figures away even as more attackers neared.

“Get away,” Enlil snarled, batting at a clawed foot as it swung at his face.

The kicker lost his balance, toppling back as Enlil twisted his grip. As he did so, another Annunaki drove a heel into Enlil’s flank, driving the breath from his lungs as he rolled across the hard floor.

Enlil sprawled on his face, his scarlet cloak in disarray about him. There was water here—a shallow channel that ran the length of the room. Four feet wide, it was used to transport items across the vast distance of the chamber. Enlil felt the water’s coolness lash against his face, reviving him instantaneously as the Annunaki figures stalked toward him, the sharp claws of their feet clacking against the bonelike tiling in a rising drumbeat of hate.

Enlil pushed himself up, assuming a crouching position. Lightning ripped across the ceiling of the chamber, echoing with such fury that he could feel its pressure drum across his chest. Behind him, a blast of that wild electricity slammed against a stack of the cylindrical birthing pods and they burst into flame. Enlil felt the heat against his back as he watched the milling crowd of reborn Annunaki. Every eye was on him, and every pair of eyes showed the unrestrained fury that welled within. He had betrayed these Igigi, these slaves, betrayed them without a thought, casting them aside as if they meant nothing. But he was a god. Was this not his right?

“Get back, damn you,” Enlil spit as the Igigi moved in on him. “I am your lord...your master...”

Enlil’s words trailed off as another of the furious Igigi leaped at him, swiping at his face with a salmon-scaled hand that ended in a phalanx of razor-sharp claws. Each of the Annunaki bodies was subtly different, each with its own attributes, its own natural weapons. Enlil rolled aside as the clawed hand reached for his face, only to find he had stepped out of the path of one attack and straight into another. This Annunaki was a broad-shouldered male with skin a canary yellow freckled with brown spots like rust. The yellow-skinned figure cuffed Enlil’s ear with a savage punch, the blow so hard it made the overlord’s head ring. Then the creatures were following up on their attack, the yellow one driving his knee viciously at Enlil’s gut while the red-scaled one got his arms around Enlil’s throat from behind and snapped him backward.

Enlil howled in agony as the knee struck his stomach. He was bent so far back by the one holding him that he couldn’t move with the blow, and so it seemed to rip through him in a paroxysm of straining muscles.

The yellow-hued creature came at Enlil again, drawing his arm back in readiness for a brutal punch to the face. Enlil watched that blow rushing at him, timing the attack in his mind before rolling his shoulders. Enlil’s move served to shift his weight just slightly, but it was enough that he dropped beneath the nasty blow, leaving it to strike at the attacker who still held him from behind by the throat. His captor, the red-scaled Annunaki male, fell down in a flurry of limbs, releasing Enlil as he did so.

Enlil fell, too, unable to keep his balance as he was drawn down by the creature that had held him. His left palm slapped against the tiled floor in a loud clap, and his bent knee brushed the surface of one of the water channels. Then he was up again, spinning back to his feet with the speed of thought.

“I am your master,” he repeated as more of the reanimated Annunaki crowded toward him. “You will bow down before me.”

Still close, the yellow-hued Annunaki pressed his attack on the traitorous overlord, lashing out with a high kick to Enlil’s jaw. The kick brushed against the

bottom of Enlil’s face, and he was driven up and back at the same time, plummeting down to the bonelike tiles once again in a swathe of billowing red cape.

The yellow Annunaki took a step toward him to renew his attack, but at that moment another lightning strike rocked the high rafters of the room and something large hurtled down from overhead, a boxy shadow in the darkness. It was a seven-foot-long section of one of the catwalks, its surface curved and bevelled, with no railings to prevent a user from stepping off. Now it tumbled through the air, crashing toward the floor beneath.

Enlil watched as the section of catwalk crashed down into the yellow figure’s back, slamming him hard across both shoulders and back of the head before he could even react. A shock wave reverberated through the room as the catwalk landed, chunks breaking away with the impact. The yellow figure dropped to the floor, moaning in agony as the catwalk pinned him in place. Blood leaked from the sides of his mouth as he tried to lift himself, but the section of catwalk was too heavy for one Annunaki to move.

Yet there was no time for Enlil to turn this momentary respite to his advantage. Already more of the Igigi creatures were swarming toward him in their stolen bodies, encircling him and cutting off any possible chance of escape. Not one of them spoke; they just stared at him through the slit eyes of the Annunaki, their hate burning in those putrid yellow depths.

Enlil pushed against the hard floor, struggling to stand. But he was too slow. Already another combatant, this one in a beautiful female Annunaki body covered in scales of cobalt blue, was lunging at him with deadly purpose. The Igigi drove both knees down into Enlil’s gut in a savage drop-blow before he could

clamber off the floor. Enlil slammed back to the tiles, his spine jarring with the bone-crunching impact. Without hesitation, Enlil’s arms snapped out and he grabbed his attacker by the throat, tightening his grip against the armorlike scale plate there.

“Look at me,” Enlil insisted, biting the words through clenched teeth. “I am your master.”

In response, the blue-scaled Annunaki hissed defiantly, spitting a glob of saliva into Enlil’s face. With a swift twist of his hands, Enlil snapped the creature’s neck, tossing her aside like so much worthless trash. They were not true Annunaki, Enlil sneered; killing them was easy. More than two hundred of the possessed bodies surrounded him, Enlil saw, and he struggled to his feet where a stream of water sparkled past him.

“I gave life unto you,” Enlil insisted, his tattered cloak swirling about him as he turned to face each of the slave class, piercing them with his indomitable gaze. “Tiamat is your mother, but I fathered you.”

He searched the crowd, eyes meeting and passing the glaring eyes of more than two hundred creatures who had spent millennia waiting for payback. Overhead, another great chunk of the ceiling peeled away like skin and crashed down, electricity playing across it like witchfire as it slammed to the plate floor behind the Annunaki forms.

“I am your master,” Enlil reminded them. “Without me, you are nothing, simply purposeless creatures.”

As one, the Igigi stepped toward Enlil, their minds working in unison, bringing their final, brutal judgment on this monster who had once ruled them. They were in uni-thought, the shared horror of spending over three thousand years without bodies creating a kind of melded mind, frayed and blurred, no longer able to differentiate between individuals.

Enlil’s shoulders shook as he struggled for breath, the exertions of this battle so soon after he had fought with Grant and his Cerberus colleagues draining his inner resources. Once again, lightning flashed overhead, lancing across the ceiling like a white-hot claw.

“I am Enlil,” the overlord stated. “Enlil the destroyer. The one known as Dagon, as Kumbari, as the Imperator. A hundred names for a million peoples, and every one of those peoples obeyed me.”

As one, the Igigi in their Annunaki shells took another menacing step toward Enlil, blocking him off on all sides, caging him in place.

Enlil glared at them, the power of his will lancing through his eyes like the hypnotic stare of the cobra. “You will obey me,” he told them, his voice firm despite his panting breath.

As one, the Igigi took another tentative step forward. And then, as one, they stopped.

Enlil turned to survey them, his gaze falling upon each in turn as more than two hundred lesser beings stood all around him, awaiting his orders once more. They had turned on him for a moment, three thousand years of torment twisting their minds, making them believe perhaps that they were his betters. But he was the overlord.

“Now,” Enlil breathed ominously, “we have work yet to do.”

Above, a triple flash of lightning hurtled across the ceiling of Tiamat’s birthing chamber, lancing down and destroying another clump of the birth pods that had been used to grow new bodies for the Annunaki. It didn’t matter. The Igigi would do.

Enlil had his army, eternally obedient. He was overlord for a reason.

* * *

GRANT’S TEAM rushed through the bone city of the dragon, the empty streets echoing with their footsteps. As they ran, Grant engaged his Commtact, a hidden radio transceiver that was used to communicate with his colleagues in the field and back at Cerberus headquarters. Most of the members of the Cerberus field teams had a surgically embedded Commtact. The subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communications unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts operated via sensor circuitry, incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in each subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, even a completely deaf user would still be able to hear, after a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device. Commtacts also functioned as real-time translation devices, providing they had enough raw vocabulary from a language programmed into their processor, and because they were directly connected to the body of the user, could amplify speech no matter how quiet.

“Encrypt alpha-niner,” Grant murmured as he brought the Commtact to life, engaging the encryption protocols that had been added to the system over the past six weeks. “Cerberus, this is Grant.”

There was a pause while Grant waited for one of his faraway colleagues to respond. The voice that came back was that of Donald Bry, a man who was loosely considered the second in command of the Cerberus operation and whose voice, like his manner, seemed ever fraught with worry. “Go ahead, Grant.”

“Have just exited Tiamat,” Grant explained. “Making our way out of the ville now. Kishiro didn’t make it and we have wounded.”

“How many?” Bry asked over the Commtact, his voice emotionless and professional now.

“Kudo took a face full of explosive,” Grant explained, “and Domi’s out of it right now. I want her checked over as soon as she wakes up. She’s been through a shitload of trauma.”

Still running, Grant turned to Rosalia with a raised eyebrow. “Rosie? Anything you want to add?”

“I can look after myself,” the dark-haired mercenary said dismissively. “You worry about your people, Magistrate.”

Unlike Grant, Rosalia had only served with Cerberus briefly. She valued her independence, and there had been no time for her to have the minor surgery necessary to implant a Commtact receiver, even had she agreed to it. Grant eyeballed her a moment longer before relating her response back to Bry. Dark streaks of ash and soot marred her otherwise beautiful features, and her clothes were ripped in places, but otherwise she seemed fine.

“We lost our transport,” Grant continued, speaking into his Commtact, “so we’re going to need an exit strategy. You have anything showing, Donald?”

The Cerberus organization favored several specific methods for transporting their personnel over vast

distances. Although its staff frequently utilized air and ground vehicles, the operation itself had taken its name from a twentieth-century military project devoted to a teleportation system that relied on mat-trans units. More recently, Cerberus had applied that knowledge to the alien design of the interphaser, accessing parallax points to transport staff across the globe and beyond.

“Scanning for mat-trans locations now,” Bry assured Grant.

“Stay on it,” Grant acknowledged. “We’re maybe fifteen minutes from city limits yet.”

With that the communication broke off at Grant’s command.

* * *

SOMEWHERE ON THE West Coast of what had historically been known as the United States of America, Cerberus operator Donald Bry was flipping through computer screen data trying to find a suitable exit point for Grant and his team. Until recently, the Cerberus headquarters had been located in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. However, following the devastating attack by Ullikummis, the redoubt had been evacuated, and the core personnel had taken up temporary residence on the West Coast. For the moment, Cerberus was much diminished while it struggled to recover, many of its surviving staff forced into hiding.

Bry was a slender man with an unruly mop of copper curls and an expression that ranged from worried to fearful. He was a man given to stressing over a given situation, be it the health of his operatives or simply what the best filling would be for his lunchtime sandwich. He was, however, a remarkable computer expert whose dedication to his job made him an irreplaceable asset to the Cerberus organization.

Bry sat amid a bank of laptops, each wired through a mainframe to boost their power and link their attributes. Across the room, Brewster Philboyd worked at his own terminal, scanning information from several satellite feeds and location marker points. Tall with swept-back blond hair, Philboyd was an astrophysicist. He wore the standard white jumpsuit of Cerberus staff along with his usual black-framed spectacles.

As the two worked at their separate tasks, another call came over the Commtact system. This one was from a field operative called Kane, and it caused some excitement in the temporary Cerberus hideout. Kane had located the base of their enemy, Ullikummis, and Philboyd and Bry combined their resources to bring the location up on screen. As they did so, the founder of the Cerberus operation, Mohandas Lakesh Singh, joined them to review the situation and speak directly with Kane.

Thus, by the time Bry got back to the question that Grant had posed, a full twenty-two minutes had passed.

“It seems that the easiest way to evac your team is to use the interphaser,” Bry explained to Grant.

“We don’t have one with us,” was Grant’s patient response.

“I’ll send someone out to meet you, and you can all come home together,” Bry said, eminently logical.

“Makes sense,” Grant agreed. “Where do you need us?”

Bry tapped out a sequence of commands on his computer keyboard, bringing up a map of parallax points, which he combined with the location transponder that Grant had with him at all times. Hidden beneath his flesh, the transponder relayed his location as well as crucial data regarding his state of health. “I’m getting a parallax reading about twelve miles to your west,” Bry explained as he watched the map light up.

“That’s gonna be a trek,” Grant complained. “Nothing closer?”

“Wait,” Bry replied, speaking as much to himself as to the man on the other end of the communication link. Before Bry’s eyes, the on-screen map glowed with the crucial locations of the parallax points. They looked like a grid of stars, sprayed across Iran, Iraq and the rest of the Arab world. As Bry watched, a new point lit up on the map just outside the dragon-shaped settlement, less than a half mile from where Grant’s transponder was showing. It was as if a new parallax point had just come into existence. But, that wasn’t possible, was it?

“Grant, I’m picking up a point close to you....” Bry began warily. “It seems to have just appeared.”

* * *

ON THE OUTSKIRTS of the dragon-shaped structure on the banks of the Euphrates, Grant, Rosalia and Kudo were staring in amazement as a huge rift opened in the air before them. Twin cones of light ebbed up and downward, growing larger as they watched. The multicolored blur within those cones was tinged with darkness as if painted on a black canvas, streaks of lightninglike witchfire playing within its depths. The Cerberus field team watched, incredulous, as the rift expanded, those twin cones spreading up from a central point at ground level, like some incredible hourglass poised in the air. For a moment it simply stood there, uncanny colors swirling in its depths. And then, even as Grant’s team struggled to take in what they were looking at, the rift in space began to disgorge hundreds upon hundreds of people, each one walking in step from its impossible depths like some incredible army. Striding at the head of that army was the unique stone figure of Ullikummis, the magmalike veins trailing across his body with a fierce, red-gold glow. Grant recognized someone else, too, walking purposefully just beside the ancient stone god—it was the unmistakable figure of missing Cerberus operative Brigid Baptiste, her red-gold hair in sympathy with those glowing strands of lava that crisscrossed Ullikummis’s frame.

Distantly, Grant was aware of Bry’s words trailing off over the Commtact receiver and he engaged the microphone pickup. “Thanks for the heads-up, Donald,” he said. “We see it. And it ain’t pretty.”

Chapter 3

Some fifteen minutes earlier, the temporary Cerberus ops room had come to excited life as a communication was received from Kane. Accompanied by an old ally of the Cerberus team, Kane revealed that he had finally discovered the location of Bensalem, the fortress island that Ullikummis had designated his headquarters.

The Cerberus operation was connected to the external world via a web of communication and surveillance devices, the core of which was made up of two satellites in geosynchronous Earth orbit. Cerberus employed concealed uplinks that chattered continuously with these orbiting satellites to provide much of the empirical data its operatives relied upon. Gaining access to the satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists at the original Cerberus redoubt. Now the Cerberus crew could draw on live feeds from an orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat.

Speaking in real time to Kane, Brewster Philboyd accessed the reconnaissance satellite to track his position. Aged somewhere in his midforties, Brewster Philboyd was a long-serving Cerberus desk jockey. His lanky six-foot frame seemed hunched as he sat at the laptop and fed information to the satellite following Kane’s instruction. Philboyd had joined the Cerberus team along with a number of other Moon exiles about two years earlier, and had proved to be a valuable addition to the staff. His dogged determination to find the cause of a problem or uncover the basic workings of a system had helped reveal the operating secrets of the interphaser. While he wasn’t a fighter, Philboyd was as determined as a dog with a bone when he was faced with a scientific or engineering problem.

As Brewster worked, Donald Bry took over the communication feed, discussing the situation with Kane. As he spoke, Lakesh walked into the sunny back room that had been transformed into the operations center.

Lakesh was not a tall man, but he stood with a regal bearing. He had dusky skin, thick black hair with slight hints of white at the temples and above the ears, and a refined mouth beneath an aquiline nose. He looked to be a man of perhaps fifty years of age, but in fact Lakesh was far older. Having spent more than a century in cryogenic suspension, Lakesh was truthfully a man of 250 years of age, and until quite recently he had looked to be exactly that. A contrivance of circumstances had served to allow Lakesh to renegotiate his age, bringing him back to a healthy fifty-something after a period of accelerated decrepitude. A physicist and cybernetics authority, Lakesh had been present when the U.S. military had first begun testing the mat-trans system. Not given to panic, Lakesh provided leadership that formed a calm center around which the Cerberus operation rotated.

“What has happened?” Lakesh asked, having heard the raised voices as he approached from the corridor outside.

“It’s Kane,” Bry explained.

“Put him on speaker,” Lakesh instructed. Though he seemed outwardly calm, a range of conflicting emotions vied for attention in Lakesh’s mind. Kane was a long-trusted member of the Cerberus team, one of the most gifted field operatives Lakesh had ever known. However, he was suffering some kind of infection that created a paralysis of his face and was affecting his vision, causing him agonizing moments of blindness. Right now Kane should be restricted to bed rest, but with personnel so thinly spread the brave ex-Magistrate had volunteered to check out an alert beacon detected coming from their old headquarters roughly six hours earlier. It was there that Kane had found their old ally Balam, with whom he now traveled.

“Kane?” Lakesh said, clipping a portable microphone pickup over one ear. The pickup angled before his mouth like a hard plastic straw, capturing his every utterance and relaying it to Kane. “This is Lakesh. Donald is just bringing me up to speed now.”

Hidden speakers on Donald Bry’s computer terminal resounded with Kane’s calm voice as the field agent replied, “Just tell me when you can see it,” he said.

There was a momentary discussion while Donald Bry explained to his mentor what was going on, and then the satellite feed on Brewster’s terminal screen centered on an overhead view of a vast island of slate-gray rock. The island was like an insect dropped into the ocean, hard, jutting planes reaching out at nightmarish angles, hooks and narrow channels dotting its brutal lines. Lakesh guessed that those channels would be almost impossible to navigate by boat.

“What is it?” Lakesh breathed, his words just about audible. “What have they found?”

“Do you see it?” Kane asked over the speakers, ignoring or not hearing Lakesh’s query.

“Yes,” Lakesh replied instantly, “but what is it?”

“Ullikummis’s home,” Kane stated matter-of-factly, his words somehow lacking the impossible gravity with which Lakesh expected they would be expressed.

Lakesh stared at the image from the satellite feed for a long moment, unaware that he was holding his breath. “Are you there now?” he asked finally.

* * *

SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES away, just off the coast of what had once been New England, two figures skulked through the throne room of Ullikummis. Crouching together in the shadows of the stone castle, the two figures could not have been more different.

The first was Kane, a powerfully built man in his early thirties, battle hardened with a tension in his body that came from years of combat readiness. A dark beard shaded his chin and jowls, while his dark hair had grown long, reaching past his collar in trailing curlicues like snakes’ tails. Kane was an ex-Magistrate turned warrior for the rebellious operation known as Cerberus. His clothes looked worn and dirty, and his denim jacket was frayed at the edges where the cuffs and hem had begun to unravel. There was something else about him, too, a bony protrusion that stabbed out from his left eye like a half-buried seashell on the beach, arcing down his cheek and marring his otherwise handsome features.

“Yeah, we’re here,” Kane said quietly, his voice picked up by the hidden Commtact implant he wore. He checked the open window as he spoke, peering out into the dark, uninviting waves that crashed through the narrow channels that cut their labyrinthine way through the island from the sea. Those would be hell to navigate, he realized.

Crouching beside Kane was the shorter figure of Balam, humanoid but not human, with a bulbous head and black eyes like limpid pools of water. Hairless, Balam’s skin was a pallid gray-white, the color a human might associate with seasickness. In contrast to Kane’s tattered combat clothes, Balam wore a long, shapeless robe that reached almost to his ankles. The robe was woven of a soft material and dyed the indigo color of a summer night’s sky. It had no pattern beyond the weave itself, but close to the collar, a darker patch showed around a frayed section where the robe had been torn during a scuffle. The dark stain was blood; Balam had been shot in the chest six days before when his charge, the foster girl known as Little Quav, had been taken from his protection by Brigid Haight.

Now Balam had joined Kane in his quest to find Quav and Brigid. The two of them had discovered this place utilizing an alien artifact in Balam’s possession, a chair that could navigate through space.

Balam watched Kane as the taller man walked warily through the empty throne room, discussing with his colleagues over the Commtact.

“We’re going to do a recon,” Kane explained to Lakesh. “I’ll have to get back to you.”

With that, he cut off the communication link, and Balam was suddenly aware that Kane was staring at him, blue-gray eyes piercing into his.

“How is your sight, friend Kane?” Balam asked, his voice reedy and eerily alien in pitch and delivery.

The thing that lay in Kane’s flesh seemed to have disrupted his vision, throwing him into bouts of temporary blindness, often accompanied by vivid hallucinations of another life—the life of his foe, Ullikummis. These problems were exacerbated by teleportation travel, be it through interphaser or the more traditional mat-trans, and Balam had speculated it was linked to the breakdown and re-forming of Kane’s molecules at a quantum level, that shock event somehow triggering the stone fleck that had become embedded in Kane’s face. The problem was so serious that, when they had met up earlier that day, Balam had proposed a mind-link that would grant Kane a clarity of vision, albeit one that was alien to his normal perception. The mind-link operated by proximity, which meant it would fail if Kane and Balam became too far separated. Even now, Kane was utilizing Balam’s link to see more clearly, to overcome the effects that the shard of rock was generating in his own vision. However, how well that was working was anyone’s guess—Kane tended to play these things close to his chest.

“I’m okay for now,” Kane replied noncommittally. “Let’s just keep moving.”

Without waiting for Balam to answer, Kane led the way through the chilly throne room, commanding the Sin Eater automatic pistol he had hidden in a wrist holster into his hand. The Sin Eater had once been the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, an automatic handblaster that folded in on itself so that it could be stored in a bulky holster strapped just above the user’s wrist. Unfolding to its full extension, the automatic pistol was a little under fourteen inches in length and equipped with 9 mm rounds. Kane’s holster reacted to a specific flinch movement of his wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into his hand. The trigger had no guard; the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features would ever be required since the Magistrates were considered infallible. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time it reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Though no longer a Magistrate himself, Kane had retained his weapon from his days in Cobaltville, and he still felt at his most comfortable with the weapon in his hand. It was an extension to his body that seemed second nature now, like the comforting weight of a wristwatch. By contrast, Balam was unarmed, his brief use of a blaster indirectly causing him to get shot.

The cold throne room was empty, and despite the sounds of the crashing waves and the caws of gulls from its open window, it seemed somehow abandoned to Kane. He had taken the lead because of his experience in the field—Kane was a soldier while Balam was, if push came to shove, nothing more than a glorified negotiator. Furthermore, going back to his days as a hard-contact Magistrate, Kane had been infamous for his so-called point-man sense, a near-psychic ability to detect danger before it happened. While that perhaps seemed superhuman to many casual observers, it was in fact a combination of Kane’s finely tuned five senses, creating an awareness of his surroundings that was almost Zenlike in its comprehension.

Right now, Kane didn’t detect anything much in the room, and he swiftly made his way out through the open doorway and into the corridor that lay beyond. Like the throne room, the corridor was empty, the stone walls cold and echoing the nearby waves as they crashed against the rough sides of the fortress island.

It was a strange feeling, walking through that corridor. On the one hand it was recognizably a corridor to Kane’s eyes. And yet, on the other hand, it also had the properties of something eroded through the ages, weathered rock ripped through by shearing winds or surging water, cutting pathways through it over the aeons. It felt cold, lifeless, charmless. Whatever had crafted this, it lacked any sense of artistry, any desire for anything beyond function. The floor was hard and rough and

unstable, the coolness of the stone so cold that it penetrated the soles of Kane’s scuffed leather boots. Window slits were hacked into the walls here and there, haphazard and open to the elements, green moss growing along their sills where the seawater had pooled.

Kane continued down the corridor on silent tread, efficiently peering left and right into open doorways that led off the tunnellike passageway. Balam kept ten paces behind him, trotting along as lightly as possible to keep his own steps quiet. Kane peered over his shoulder, checking that the diminutive alien was keeping pace.

“Don’t get too far behind,” Kane instructed in a whisper. “If I have to shoot something, I’m going to want you close by. Or something bad will happen.”

Balam looked at Kane apologetically. “I’m sorry, Kane,” he whispered. “I’m unused to the application of stealth in this manner.”

Kane nodded. “Just don’t get shot if it kicks off,” he warned, and then he continued on his way, hurrying down the corridor at a jog.

Following the ex-Magistrate, Balam was searching the vast fortress in his own way. A telepath, Balam had nurtured an especially close bond with his foster child, the missing Quav. He had sensed her essence here the very moment that they arrived, feeling it like some vibrant tapestry hanging on the stone walls. Little Quav was the culmination of the Annunaki experiments with rebirth, and she had been placed in Balam’s care shortly after her birth to protect her from forces that might use her for ill. In that way, Balam had acted as a neutral party, siding neither with the Annunaki nor humanity but rather shielding the child from the dark destiny contained within her genetic code. Losing the child had hurt Balam, and he knew he had been played for a fool by the wily Ullikummis, tricked by the familiar face of Brigid Baptiste when she had appeared in Agartha. Balam had swiftly realized that Brigid was an agent for an antagonistic party, but with supreme irony, his very seclusion to protect Quav had also meant he was out of touch with developments in the wider world.

Whether foreknowledge of the rise of Ullikummis would have changed things, Balam could not say. As things stood, Balam felt Quav’s loss like a scar, a wound on his own body that had cut far deeper than the bullet he had taken to the chest from Brigid Haight’s gun during the kidnapping. In this, Balam and Kane had shared a tragedy, for Kane had also been shot by Brigid in her new guise as Ullikummis’s hand in darkness. For Kane, that blow had cut even deeper. Physically, the bullet had left merely a bruise on Kane’s chest, failing to pierce his armor and hence his flesh. But he and the woman now calling herself Haight were linked, a spiritual bond that entwined both of them through time immemorial. They shared the bond of anam charas, or “soul friends,” and it seemed to carry over to different incarnations of the two of them, despite where they found themselves. To many, it sounded like mumbo jumbo, but Kane’s bond to Brigid was deep and semimystical, despite his own eminently practical nature.

Kane moved through the arching doorway of a room, stepping quietly over the threshold. He could tell immediately that this room had a presence, something indefinable in the air that seemed to act as a warning. It stank of meat and burning, an almost physical wall of stench that made a person’s nose wrinkle and eyes sting. Kane had encountered numerous incredible situations in his life, from ghostly hauntings to alien possession, and he had developed something of an instinct for the unusual. Wary now, he scanned the room, the Sin Eater poised before him, tracking the movements of his eyes. This room was large—more than fifty feet in length—and square, with a high ceiling that added to the sense of space. Like the rest of the fortress isle, the walls, ceiling and floor were carved from the same slatelike rock, roughly finished with bumps and chips all around, everything left unadorned by decoration.

There was a pit in the center of the floor, Kane saw, and it dominated the room with its unspoken sense of purpose. Kane stepped toward it without hesitation, still scanning the room for signs of anyone else. Balam hurried along behind him, stepping just inside the doorway and feeling the chill of the room immediately.

Turning to Balam, Kane raised his empty hand, signaling that he should wait where he was. Then the Cerberus warrior continued on, remaining on high alert as he approached the pit. Twenty feet across, the pit was shallow and it was darker around its edges than the surrounding rock where something had charred it.

Kane peered into the pit, already suspecting what he would see there. A deep pile of ashes was spread across the circular indentation, and amid them Kane could see a few bones, several of which were broken, viciously snapped in two. He had seen this before, months earlier when Ullikummis had first arrived on Earth and set up Tenth City, his first attempt at indoctrinating the peoples of the world. There Ullikummis had forced his recruits into brutal bouts of combat to determine both their physical prowess and their loyalty to him. A vast chimney dominated the skyline of that primitive settlement, and those who failed him had been cremated within its eerie confines. Here, once again, Ullikummis had burned those who had failed him, Kane realized, pilgrims who had risked the arduous journey through the narrow, chasmlike channels weaving through the sea fortress to meet their god.

As he looked at the hard, pebblelike flecks among the ashes, something caught Kane’s eye. It was a bone, covered in ashes that rested along its length in a little mound. Leaning down, Kane poked at the bone with the nose of his pistol, pushing the worst of the dirt aside. The ashes fell away in silence. It was a bone, all right, no question of that. But when Kane looked at it more closely, he was surprised by the length of it. It looked like a leg bone, maybe a femur, but it was incredibly long. Furthermore, it bulged and featured a subtle twist. Kane had seen many skeletons in his days with Cerberus, but this was unlike anything he had seen before.

“Balam?” Kane called quietly. “What do you make of this?”

Balam shuffled over to join Kane, peering down into the pit where Kane nudged his pistol against his grisly find. “Leg bone?” Balam asked.

“Yeah, but from what?”

Unblinking, Balam looked at it and considered, recalling what he knew of human anatomy. “It looks human in the first instance, but there is something...untoward to its nature. As if it has been...”

Kane glanced up at him. “Changed?” he prompted when Balam left the sentence hanging.

“‘Changed’ is as adequate a word as any,” Balam agreed.

“But how, and by what?” Kane asked, voicing his thoughts.

“The Annunaki are masters of genetic manipulation,” Balam reminded him. “Ullikummis himself is a

horror by their standards, but only because of the

genetic changes wrought upon him at his father’s insistence.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Kane said, nodding. That was not simply old information to Kane; his senses had been assaulted with flashes of Ullikummis’s memories each time he had made a teleportation jump over the past weeks—and so, in some sense, he had experienced much of the nightmarish surgery that had featured in the Annunaki prince’s earliest years. If nothing else, it had given Kane an insight into why the son hated his father with such fury.

“Something’s changed these people,” Balam proposed. “Something altered them—”

“Or tried to. Look at this junk,” he said, riffling through the ash with the muzzle of his blaster. “Someone’s been cooking up a storm, and I’ll bet you it was someone who wanted to destroy the evidence of his failures.”

“The Annunaki do not have failures,” Balam stated wistfully. “They suffer disappointments, nothing more.”

“Well,” Kane said, drawing his Sin Eater out of the sifting sands of ash, “someone’s had a shitload of disappointments in here.

“And we should keep moving,” he added.

With that, Kane stood and led the way through the huge room with Balam trotting along at his heels. Balam looked back a moment, staring at the black smudge of the pit that dominated the room. Death seemed to follow Kane, lying in wait wherever he went.

* * *

IN THE WEST COAST operations room, Lakesh studied the satellite view of the island of Bensalem and consulted several reference documents.

“This island did not exist a year ago,” he stated, shaking his head.

Brewster Philboyd looked at the map that Lakesh had brought up on his own computer screen. “This Ullikummis has pulled things out of thin air before now,” he said miserably.

“No, not thin air, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh corrected. “Rock. He has an affinity to rock, it seems, and is able to employ a form of telekinesis to call on such to do his bidding. That was, by our best guess, how he created his Tenth City. The rock itself was pulled up from beneath the soil—bedrock.”

“So, this island—he’s pulled it from the sea?” Philboyd theorized.

“It seems probable.”

Philboyd shrugged. “I guess even monsters need somewhere to live,” he said, nervously pushing the spectacles back up the bridge of his nose.

“No,” Lakesh said, “there’s more to it than that. Look at the design. Almost circular, with the highest towers based in its center. This is the same design that the nine villes followed.”

Brewster moved his face a little closer to the screen, watching the live feed from the satellite as the dark blurs of gulls passed through the overhead image. “That’s been cropping up a lot lately, huh?”

“It is the open secret we never noticed,” Lakesh said cryptically. Seeing Brewster’s quizzical look, Lakesh smiled apologetically and cleared his throat. “This design, the circular pattern of lower buildings rising to a peak in the center—this is the form that every city in the history of humankind has taken. After Brigid’s experience of attempted mind control in Tenth City, she theorized that there was something in the architectural design itself that focused a person’s thoughts in specific ways, perhaps making them more susceptible to instruction. As such, it is a way of controlling people, a sigil that traverses time. This is the same design of the cities that you and I inhabited in the twentieth century. We may presume that the subtle control of humanity by the Annunaki is long-lived, Mr. Philboyd.”

While it seemed fanciful, the use of sigils—or magical symbols—that Lakesh referred to was prevalent throughout human history. Most infamous among these was the Nazi swastika, a reversed symbol for peace that, in its mirrored form, was believed to have wrought conflict.

Lakesh and Brewster stared at the image on the latter’s terminal screen in silence while, across the room, Donald Bry became more animated in his conversation with Grant about the mysteriously appearing parallax point. At the same time, one of the Tigers of Heaven, the modern-day samurai warriors whose property the Cerberus base had temporarily commandeered, took two paces into the room before subtly attracting Lakesh’s attention.

“Dr. Singh,” the squat, broad-shouldered warrior urged, “your presence is required outside by Mistress Shizuka.”

Lakesh nodded. “Keep an eye on the situation here,” he told Brewster Philboyd, glancing across to Donald Bry as he did so. “If anything changes, I want to know.”

“Sir,” Brewster acknowledged with a curt nod.

* * *

THOUGH FULL OF OMINOUS shadows, the fortress of Ullikummis appeared to be empty, and after a while Kane stated that conclusion out loud. “If we haven’t bumped into anyone by now, my guess is we ain’t gonna.”

The fortress had several levels, connected by rough, uneven staircases or spiraling ramps. While its passageways were wide, the rooms felt haphazard and cramped, like things that had budded from the main walkways rather than been intentionally connected. That was disquieting to Kane, who felt there was something almost living about the structure itself despite its lack of movement. It felt grown, formed organically. In some way, walking through the fortress felt a little like walking through a body.

They found rooms that contained possessions, obviously human. One room had a bunch of letters on the hard stone cot that stretched against one wall, tied with a ribbon and inexpertly hidden in the folds of a fur blanket. Another room, this one featuring two stone bunks, had a simple game board carved of wood, a jointed hinge along its center so that the pieces could be cleverly stored within. None of the rooms had doors, and Kane recalled how the cells had worked in Life Camp Zero, the prison that Ullikummis had used to hold the Cerberus exiles. Those cells had seemed to be hollows in the rock like honeycombs, and their doors only appeared when necessary, a shifting of a rock wall that seemed almost to have the properties of a liquid and a solid in one item.

Balam stopped as they walked past another open doorway, turning and walking to the room as if in a trance. Kane continued on, peering in each open doorway in turn, glancing across the shadow-dappled interiors before moving to the next. Three rooms along, he saw something odd resting on the floor. Clearly broken, it looked like a bucket seat or a gigantic vase, the top torn free to leave a jagged line. As Kane stepped closer, something fluttered across his vision and he found his sight turning dark. Kane looked around, realizing for the first time that Balam was no longer with him. He hadn’t noticed his silent companion had stopped some doors away from him, and it only dawned on him now when his vision started to fade, the colors ebbing away to be replaced by grayness, the subtle edges of the stone walls and the shattered bowllike object diminished to a blur.

“Balam?” Kane called, turning.

The two were linked, and it was in this way that Kane could see, using their telepathic tie to overcome his own blindness. Proximity affected the bond, lessening its effectiveness as Kane well knew from a similar event while they had been searching the old Cerberus redoubt. So many new limitations to remember and to juggle, Kane cursed as he stepped out of the room. So many hazards to navigate at each turn.

“Balam? Where did you go?”

The weight of the Sin Eater still in his hand, Kane marched back down the corridor where he had just been. One advantage of their link was that he couldn’t lose Balam for long, he thought cheerlessly; he just had to walk around until his vision became clear again.

When Kane found Balam, the smaller humanoid was standing in the middle of a small room. The room contained a simple bed, a stone base with a little padding from several furs, a blanket made of the same. There was a narrow window on one wall that was little bigger than a letter slot, but the room was otherwise unremarkable. Balam was poised silently in the center of the room, his hands clasped together before him, his eyes closed.

“Balam? Everything okay?” Kane urged.

“She was here,” the gray-skinned creature said. He spoke quietly, and his eyes remained closed in meditation.

“Who?” Kane asked and stopped himself, realizing that the question was redundant. Balam meant Little Quav, of course.

“She’s not afraid,” Balam continued. “Merely...curious. She was told things here, taught things.”

“Some learning curve,” Kane muttered. “Imprisoning a three-year-old girl in a big stone fortress.”

Balam’s eyes flickered open, their dark orbs peering wistfully into Kane’s. “I do not believe she was imprisoned, Kane. This was a family reunion, mother and son.”

“Well, she ain’t here now,” Kane said, indicating the empty room.

“No,” Balam agreed. “So where is she? Where is Ullikummis?”

Kane racked his brain for a moment, trying to think in the manner of the Annunaki. They were multidimensional beings whose malice was just one aspect of their eternal boredom with their lives. So where would Ullikummis go next?

“Enlil,” Kane said slowly. “That’s the piece that’s missing from this family reunion.”

Balam’s bulbous head rocked back and forth on his spindly neck as he nodded his agreement. “The child is not ready,” he said after some consideration. “Her Ninlil aspect has yet to be teased out of her. She remains the little girl that you and I know as Quav. It will be years before that changes.”

“There’s something you should see,” Kane said, gesturing to the corridor. “Maybe you can make sense of it.” He was talking about the bowllike thing he had found, but he chose not to add that he had been unable to analyze it because his vision had failed. It wouldn’t help to remind Balam of this; the First Folk diplomat was jumpy enough as it was.

Thus, Kane led the way from the room with Balam at his side. There were no doors in the gloomy palace, so everything here was open to view now.

Three doorways along, Kane stepped into the room, encouraging Balam to follow. There, in the center of the room, lay the broken bowllike structure. Kane could see it better now with his eyes recovered, and he studied it properly for the first time. Bigger than an armchair, the bowl seemed to be made of some kind of stone and rested on a very low plinth that raised it a quarter inch above the stone floor. The top edge was jagged as if the rest of it had been snapped away and, looking at it now, Kane was reminded of an egg. There were shards of the broken remains all around, quartz within it like plates of stained glass twinkling in the light from the arrow-slit windows that lined the room on three sides.

“Any ideas?” Kane prompted.

“A chrysalis,” Balam said. There was no hint of doubt in his voice.

“You seen this before?” Kane challenged.

Balam inclined his head in a nod. “They are one of the ways that the Annunaki employed to stave off their immense boredom,” he explained as he leaned down to pick through the wreckage strewed about the cuplike object. “You will have heard of how the gods of the Annunaki wore different faces and thus appeared to different cultures in different ways. Overlord Enlil was also Kumbari. Zu was Anzu...”

“Lilitu, Lilith,” Kane added, nodding.

“On occasion this would involve a period of cosmetic change,” Balam elaborated, “a minor amusement to the Annunaki. The chrysalis was one manner by which this was achieved.”

“So, Ullikummis has been—what—changing his face?” Kane questioned. “Ugly bastard like that’s going to take a lot of work.”

“No, not Ullikummis,” Balam said, studying one of the broken fragments of the rock shell. “This pod is too small for an adult form. It was used on a child.”

Kane fixed Balam with his stare. “I think we both know what that means, right?”

Balam nodded. “Quav.”

Chapter 4

“There’s got to be a thousand of them,” Grant muttered as he watched the massing army step from the crazed pattern of colors and light that swam in the air over the banks of the Euphrates.

“More than that, Magistrate,” Rosalia corrected, indicating the center of the rift.

Grant turned to where the dark-haired woman had indicated and saw the rift in space growing larger, its hourglass shape swelling in the center to disgorge more people with increased vigor. The rift crackled with lightning against a deep nothingness, swirling colors spinning and fraying in its depths, splitting apart to form even more colors as Grant watched. He estimated that the rift was a quarter mile across now, and as it increased in size it became harder to look it, burning against the rods and cones of his retina like some grisly optical illusion. It was an interphase window, Grant knew, but one so large as to reach a scale he had never seen before. The interphaser was designed for personal transport, carrying just a few people and limited matériel at a time. This, however, was on a scale he had never imagined, like some great monument tunneling through the very air over the sun-dappled surface of the Euphrates. Grant had never seen anything like it.

“Where the fuck are they all coming from?” he muttered, shaking his head.

“I attended a few of the rallies for Ullikummis,” Rosalia spoke, her voice low. “Held in the old bombed-out sports stadiums and parking lots, they would regularly attract a thousand, fifteen hundred people at a time. It was quite something seeing that many people chanting in unison.”

Grant turned to look at Rosalia, his brow furrowed, as the army massed behind him. “‘Quite something,’” he repeated. “Huh.”

“What?” Rosalia asked, challenge in her voice.

“It’s never ‘scary’ with you, is it?” Grant observed. “Always just something that happened.”

“The world’s as scary as we choose for it to be, Grant,” Rosalia told him cryptically. “You look at things the way you choose to. No one else makes you frightened but you yourself.”

The rift continued to expel more and more people of all ages and body types. Many of them wore the familiar robes of Ullikummis’s enforcers, some with the red badge shining over their left breast like those of the old Magistrates. There were dogs there, too, Grant saw—strange dogs with long bodies and heavy, loping movements, their shapes carved from living stone.

Ullikummis himself waited at the head of the army, backing slowly away from the rift to allow his followers space to spread out, Brigid and the little girl at his side.

“We’re going to need to get closer,” Grant decided. He was still hefting Domi’s unconscious form in his arms, and despite the burden he showed no signs of tiredness.

Rosalia indicated the albino woman. “Planning on taking her?”

“No,” Grant replied. Then he turned to Kudo, the man who’d lost half his face to the acid spillage inside the bowels of Tiamat. “Kudo, you good to get home if I leave you in charge of Domi?”

Kudo nodded, bringing forth a portable communications device from its secure place in a belt pouch. “I can tap Cerberus comms and ask them to guide me,” he said without arguing. Like all Tigers of Heaven, Kudo was a fearless warrior who would never shy away from a fight. However, he also recognized the need for authority, and bowed to Grant’s decisions as squad leader.

“Great,” Grant said as he passed his pale burden to Kudo. The modern-day samurai took the petite woman, hefting her over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Tell Donald to trace Domi’s transponder. He can use that to guide you to the nearest safe haven from which you can make the jump home.”

Kudo nodded once. “As you command.” Then he walked away from the scene, speaking into the comm unit.

Within moments, Grant and Rosalia were alone at the edge of the citylike dragon ship, watching as the tear in the air continued spilling more of the mismatched troops to the ground.

Rosalia reached down to the handle of her sword, her hand brushing against it to ensure it was still there. “How do you propose we do this?” she asked.

Grant held his right arm out, palm open, and his Sin Eater slapped into his hand from its hiding place beneath his sleeve. “Let’s play it by ear.”

* * *

SELA STONE HEARD the call like a racing drumbeat in her skull, its urgency increasing until it became impossible to ignore. A black-skinned woman, slender and hungry-looking, she had a body that was all toned muscle, no flab. She had not always been called Sela Stone; three months earlier she had been Sela Sinclair, one of the security experts for Cerberus before their redoubt had been infiltrated and all personnel had been taken prisoner. It was a distant memory now, that first vision of Ullikummis as he strode through the familiar corridors of the redoubt with his army of followers, overcoming all attempts to stop them. He had touched her, a fleck of himself embedding in her head like a living thing. The stone put Sela in touch with Ullikummis, helped her to comprehend his will, to accept him as her god.

Since that day, Sela had heard the quiet drums beating over and over in her head. The noise had become reassuring, a heartbeat from another world, the heartbeat of her god and savior. The drumming increased whenever Ullikummis was near, and also when those most important to him—such as the warrior woman known as Haight—came close. And this day, as Sela sat before a small congregation in the old province of Samariumville, preaching the word of Stone, she felt the drums beat louder and faster. As a believer in the future under Ullikummis, Sela had taken her first steps in spreading the word, gathering just a dozen of the outlander farmers in a dilapidated barn to tell them of the glorious utopia that was coming. A few days before, she had still been undercover, hiding in the shadows with her Cerberus teammate, Farrell, giving no indication that she had been turned. Now she was an Alpha, promoting the word of the new god.

“His love is stone, unbreakable, unconquerable,” Sela assured them. “His embrace is the embrace of the all. His future is the pinnacle of achievement, the glory of utopia.”

As she spoke, she could hear the drums inside her head getting faster and faster. She saw the farmers’ eyes widen as something changed behind her, and she turned, her own words turning to silence on her lips. Where the barn wall had been just a moment before now stood a swirling hole of blackness, dark colors twisting within its newly impossible depths, lightning strikes ravaging within. The hole seemed to pulse, subtly changing shape like a living creature breathing in and out. Sela recognized it from her time with Cerberus; it was a rift window created by an interphaser.

She stepped back automatically, giving room for the interphaser’s user to step out—but no one did. Behind her, the congregation of farmers and the hardy-looking women they had taken for their wives watched in awe. “Is this the utopia?” one of them asked. “Has it arrived?”

Sela peered deep into the impossible depths of the quantum window, watching those swirling colors coalesce and part over and over, no two patterns alike. There, deep in the swimming burst of light, fingers seemed to be moving, an upturned hand pulling back as if giving Sela the go-ahead signal. The hand was rough and crudely formed, as if it had been hewed from solid rock. When she saw this, Sela Stone knew just what to do. Without a second’s hesitation, she stepped into the pulsing swirl of darkness, letting the quantum window wash over her like the tide on a beach, bathing her in its power.

An instant later, Sela Stone found herself stepping out of the rift onto an expanse of sand close to a riverbank. Hundreds of people were massing there—perhaps thousands—each one loyal to her master, Ullikummis, a vast sea of people clamoring for space.

Up ahead, Sela could see the silhouette of a dragon, its craning neck lunging into the skies as if to smell the low clouds that danced before the morning sun. The dragon was five or six miles away, at least, yet it was so immense that its head towered over the vista of the Euphrates River, and its wings spread out, reaching to perhaps a mile away from where she stood. The wings were ragged and skeletal, their bones pale-colored struts like some weird panorama of buildings.

Behind Sela, the dozen farmers had followed, stepping from the rift in space to add their bodies to the burgeoning army of Ullikummis. They followed not because of the obedience stone—unlike Sela, they hadn’t received an implant—but because they wanted to believe that there could be this golden future, the one that Ullikummis, their stone-clad fallen angel, had promised.

Sela, like a number of others among the thousands-strong crowd, felt the call because of the stone that had been implanted in her head. Known as an obedience stone, it was a tiny chip from Ullikummis’s own body. He could grow these at will, tearing them from his body like buds from a plant. All of them had a droplet of rudimentary sentience, enough that they could speak to their hosts, bonding with them and influencing their thoughts. Accepting the obedience stone was traumatic, for the stone had to push through the skin to bond itself to the user, but this pain had come to be seen as a rite of passage among the faithful, a sacrifice they made in their devotion to the new god. After all, the faithful preached, the stone created a new way of understanding the world, a new life, and as such, it was a birth and any birth was characterized as much by pain as by joy, was it not?

The stone pulsed within Sela, hugging the lobes of her brain, its tendrils enveloping her mind. The stone brought an enlightenment, a freedom for the bearer. It was an entheogen, bringing to all people who used it a sense of being a part of their god. The stones acted as markers, too, the same way that the transponders were used by the Cerberus people, and it was through these locators that Ullikummis had reached out for his most faithful, opening the multiwindow of the quantum interphase jump in a way that had never been seen before. A hundred quantum gateways had all opened upon the same location—on this location. This, too, was something that Ullikummis had learned in the Ontic Library, accessing its sentient banks of knowledge to discover new ways to utilize the Annunaki technology. These were old secrets, things that had been forgotten millennia ago. Ullikummis could generate parallax points where there were none, and he could fold quantum space in such a way that he could jump between parallax points, ambushing even the most wary of opponents. The old ways were the new ways.

* * *

“DAMMIT!” ROSALIA CURSED as she and Grant prowled warily along the edge of the city, as close as they dared get to the massing army on the banks of the Euphrates.

Grant glared at her. “You want to keep it down?” he warned.

When he looked he saw that Rosalia was holding her left wrist and her teeth were clenched in pain.

“What is it?” Grant asked more gently, regretting his knee-jerk reaction.

“Stone’s playing up,” the dark-haired woman answered, breathing hard through her nostrils.

“Run that by me again?” Grant requested, clearly confused.

“I have the stone inside me,” Rosalia said, “you know that. Damn thing’s pounding against my nerve like a fucking metronome.” She winced, holding down hard on her wrist until the pain passed.

Like Sela Sinclair, Rosalia had one of the obedience stones implanted beneath her skin. But through her own subtle manipulations of her flesh, her stone had remained locked at her wrist, unable to attach itself properly and so bond with her. The stone was of a different variety to Sinclair’s, as it had come not from Ullikummis but from one of his faithful troops. Besides affecting a person’s thought processes, the stone was also used to operate hidden stone locks designed by Ullikummis within his bases, a little like a remote control opened a garage door.

In the earliest days of the Ullikummis religious movement, those with stones would identify those without by just being in their presence. That facet had become less important over time, as more people had joined the Ullikummis movement willingly, truly believing that a new and better world was coming.

Left unchecked, the stones would affect the thinking of anyone who had one, but Rosalia had assured the Cerberus people that she had hers under control. “It only works on the weak-minded,” she had dismissed contemptuously. However, few people knew how much effort Rosalia put in to maintaining the rock’s position beneath her skin, using a needle to cut into her own flesh daily to prevent it from locking there and so forming a more permanent—and dangerous—bond.

Now the rock inside her was drumming against her nerves like something alive.

“You’re all right?” Grant asked.

Rosalia nodded. “Just go.”

Ahead of them, the rift continued to swell, a great wound in the sky. Lightning crackled in its depths as it blurted out more people into the already swollen ranks of Ullikummis’s troops. Among them were the hooded security teams who had assumed the place of the Magistrates, their malleable flesh as hard as stone. There were so many people now that it seemed chaotic.

The buildings around them were not buildings at all. In fact, they were the jutting bones of Tiamat’s wings, reminders that the great organic spaceship had regrown her body from a seed. The structures had indentations and steps and hooded porches, but they had no doors or windows. These things had been grown over with bone, leaving just the ghost of a building that never was.

Grant indicated one of the lower buildings, where a run of steps jutted along its back wall. The steps ended midway up the wall, leaving a whole other story above them. The wall itself bent forward as if it might topple, and another nearby structure did the same, creating a narrow channel between the two at their closest points.

Grant was up the steps in an instant, with Rosalia following. She waited poised at the foot of the steps, keeping a sharp lookout for anybody who might spot them among the long shadows of the early-morning sun before she clambered up the steps after the ex-Mag.

Bolting to the top of the bone steps, Grant reached up with his free hand and grasped high on the wall where it met with the lip of the roof. Without slowing, he pulled himself up, his feet kicking out as he continued to move. In less than two seconds, Grant had flipped himself onto the roof, three stories above ground level. He crouched there, crab-walking to the far edge of the roof where he would have a better view of the massing army.

Rosalia followed a moment later. Her swift strides brought her up the pale steps at a run before springing toward the wall of the adjacent building and using it to kick herself higher and land on the rooftop with Grant, making just the bare minimum of noise. Keeping her head low, Rosalia hurried to join Grant at its edge.

Beyond the roof, they could see the quantum gateway hovering next to the Euphrates, its impossible depths churning with a swirl of beautiful colors. Grant and Rosalia watched in awe as Ullikummis turned to the people from the head of that vast column of loyal followers, raising his long, stone-clad arms. In a moment, the crowd fell to silence, two thousand or more people hushed without so much as a word. It was quite something to behold.

The stone giant stood on a hillock by the river, a raised mound of dirt beside the rippling surface. Brigid stood beside him, her red-gold hair shimmering with the sunlight, clutching the hand of the little girl in the indigo dress.

“Behold the tools of the future,” Ullikummis said, his voice carrying across the burgeoning group of arrivals. He indicated the dragon shape that stood behind him, its arrow-shaped head looming high above, his voice echoing through the abandoned streets. “Here is Tiamat, the engine that will change the world. Here is your future, waiting to be freed from terrible bondage.

“Will you stand with me as I free Tiamat?”

The crowd cheered in response, hanging on Ullikummis’s every word.

“Will you embrace the future for the betterment of all?”

Again the crowd cheered.

“Onward, bearers of the future,” Ullikummis yelled, “onward to utopia.”

With that, the stone god turned and began to stride toward the outskirts of the dragon city, his tree-trunk-like feet stomping against the sandy soil in brutal, punishing blows. Brigid Haight strode with him, hurrying little Quav along at her side, the army of two thousand or more following briskly in their wake.

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