Distortion Offensive (17 page)

The huge stone figure of Ullikummis sat serenely in the thronelike seat at the side of the towering structure in the center of the underwater library. As Kane stepped closer, he noticed the rough sides of the reverse-funnel-like shape that towered up into the rafters, and it struck him that here was something that had been grown rather than built.

Ullikummis himself was eight feet in height, and even sitting as he was now, his immense form gave Kane a palpable sense of foreboding. Though humanoid in appearance, Ullikummis seemed to be made entirely of stone, burned charcoal plates across his chest and his thick, heavy arms and legs. Between these plates, rivulets of liquid rushed back and forth, glowing with the orange intensity of lava. The hulking creature's eyes were like lava, too, Kane knew, though they appeared now to be closed, the so-called stone god deep in sleep or concentration. Thick stone ridges emerged from the tips of his shoulders, reaching up with jagged tips and reminding Kane of the horns of a stag.

The story of Ullikummis was a tragic one. He was the princeling son of Annunaki Overlord Enlil, and his life had been guided by the whims of his father. His sole purpose had been to become an assassin, his father's hand in the darkness, and the child had been transformed from the familiar, almost beautiful reptilian
appearance of an Annunaki into the stone monstrosity that now waited before the Cerberus field team. Blessed with great strength, speed and stealth that belied his tremendous form, Ullikummis was the product of many years of genetic manipulation, now as much a weapon as the lethal accessories a normal assassin would wield.

However, over four thousand years ago Ullikummis had been the victim of a greater game, and he found himself the focus of Enlil's legendary ire. Imprisoned in an asteroid and blasted into space, Ullikummis had been exiled from Earth for all time, his position in the Annunaki pantheon almost entirely forgotten.

Scant weeks ago, Ullikummis had returned during a fantastical meteor shower that had lit the skies over Saskatchewan, Canada, and he had set in motion his plan to have revenge on his father for that earlier betrayal. Kane, Brigid and Grant, along with a handful of other Cerberus personnel, had been called upon to stop the growth of a military-style training camp in the wilds of Canada, the so-called Tenth City, and their mission had ended with the apparent obliteration of the stone god himself.

And yet now, to Kane's horror, Ullikummis sat before him, intact and showing no signs of that previous fiery trauma that Kane himself had been responsible for.

“It's impossible,” Kane muttered, his voice an angry growl. “We killed him. He's dead.”

“Well,” Clem said cheerily, “he doesn't appear to be breathing.”

Automatically, Kane's eyes roved over the static form of the stone god, searching the rocky plates of his chest for signs of movement. “I don't know if he needs to breathe,” Kane admitted. “What I do know is that we
killed him, I saw myself as his body was blasted to atoms in a superheated furnace.”

Brigid placed a reassuring hand on Kane's arm, and he turned to her, seeing the emotional turmoil in her beautiful porcelain face mirroring his own roiling feelings. “The Annunaki do have an annoying habit of escaping what appears to be certain death,” she reminded him.

“But his body was—” Kane began.

“
Something
burned,” Brigid agreed, “but maybe it wasn't him. Maybe we only saw what Ullikummis wanted us to see.”

Brigid's words had extra meaning, Kane knew, for she had explained to him the eerie effects that the architecture of Tenth City had had on her, playing at her mind and forcing her to think in a certain, somewhat disturbing manner. From this anecdotal evidence, the theory was even now being explored that the structural layout of the other nine villes that had ruled America for approximately a century might in fact have a constraining effect on the human mind, acting as a magical sigil to direct a person's thoughts. And more, that perhaps the structural layout of every city in the history of civilization had followed this uncanny, almost supernatural pattern so as to subtly imprison and guide the human race. It had seemed incredible at first, but the past was full of the use of magical symbols that acted as focal points to power, most notoriously the swastika used by the Nazi Party in the 1930s.

While Kane and Brigid paced across the vast room, their footsteps echoing in the incredible proportions of that undersea chamber, Grant remained by the open doorway rigging up one of the powerful flashlights to illuminate the corridor they had come through. Grant
could see the spiderlike creatures scuttling back and forth across the lumpy surfaces of the corridor's walls and floor as the effects of the burning flash-bangs finally faded, and he repressed a shiver that ran the length of his spine.

“Weird shit,” Grant muttered as he left the flashlight poised over the doorway, setting the beam to flash at regular six-second intervals. That should be enough to keep the creatures dumbfounded, and prevent them from entering the main chamber while Grant and the crew got to work.

Like the corridor arrangement, the inside of the vast chamber had an uneven floor made of what appeared to be dried coral, its latticework intricate and obtuse, never quite repeating the same pattern twice. Grant looked around warily, checking for movements, but he couldn't detect anything living in the ridges of the flooring—no more of the spider things, at least.

Between some sections, Grant saw, in a fairly haphazard arrangement, lights glowed in a dull display of greens and blues, the colors of the ocean. Their intensity was faint, and Grant saw several flicker out as he walked past them, much as the ones in the corridor had while the Cerberus teammates had been walking its length. Peering closer, Grant saw that the lights appeared to be ridged, and he could see something moving within the body of the light itself, as if a creature trapped beneath glass. Clem had noticed this, too, and he took a knife out of the sheath he wore at his belt, just a little tool with a blade no more than two inches, and used it to pry one of the floor lights free.

“Any idea what they are, Clem?” Grant asked as the oceanographer rolled the spherical light over on the hard surface of the floor.

“Something new, but definitely alive,” Clem breathed, his voice full of wonder.

Grant watched as Clem tapped at the hard covering of the glowing sphere with the edge of his blade, and the light fizzled out, its greenness winking to a lifeless black. Then the peculiar creature rolled itself across the floor on its spherical shell until it dropped into another valley in the uneven floor. A moment later it began to glow once again.

Similar lights glowed within the walls and in the struts that held the ceiling up, high above their heads. Clem looked around at everything, his eyes wide in wonder. It seemed to Grant that the poor guy was so fascinated that he couldn't look hard enough.

“Come on, Clem,” Grant urged, “let's go see what the others have found.”

Kane and Baptiste, meanwhile, swiftly scouted around the vast edges of the room before they made their way warily toward the majestic stone figure of Ullikummis where he waited on the thronelike outcropping of the towering structure that dominated the chamber. There were several other corridorlike structures leading off this main area, but all of them featured low doorways that barely came up to Kane's hip. It seemed that the whole undersea base had been built, if that was the right word, with visitors in mind, guiding them to this chamber while the remainder remained hidden and, presumably, formed the bulk of the Ontic Library's fearsome knowledge.

“Service tunnels maybe?” Kane suggested, indicating one of the low hatches.

Brigid leaned down, peering into the nearest of them. It was shrouded in shadow, pitch-black inside, and she became aware of a faint but unpleasant odor emanating
from within, as if something had died there. “Reeks, whatever it is,” she told Kane as she played the beam of the xenon flashlight over the insides. What she saw was empty, but the rough-sided, low tunnel stretched far into darkness. After a few seconds of analysis, Brigid lifted herself up from the hard floor.

Together, the two of them continued making their way toward where the mighty stone giant waited serenely beneath the colossal treelike structure dominating the vast room. As they got closer, they saw that the stone god appeared to be “wired” into the arboresque structure, tendrils snaking down from its upper levels before disappearing into the rock surface of Ullikummis's malformed skull.

“Is it feeding him?” Kane asked.

“If it is,” Brigid said, keeping her voice low, “it's feeding him information.”

Above them, the tendrils wound around the towering plantlike structure of the room's centerpiece, displaying a stillness that somehow spoke of their great age. Kane couldn't define it, but he felt as though he was looking at something incredibly ancient, an old oak tree planted at the bottom of the ocean, a tree of knowledge.

“What is it?” Kane asked, admiring the structure before him.

“I think that's the heart of the library,” Brigid said. “Like some grand database that Ullikummis has tapped into.”

“It's like something grown,” Kane said in wonderment.

“It's Annunaki. Organic technology,” Brigid proposed, feeling less certain than she sounded.

Close up, they could see how the towering structure had wrapped itself around the immense form of
Ullikummis. Struts appeared to have grown out of the lower regions, trapping his feet and legs like binding straps, while two branchlike limbs crisscrossed over his chest. The crossing limbs had smaller tendrils poking from them, as thin as copper wire, and the ends of these tendrils appeared to have burrowed into Ullikummis's chest, disappearing amid the cracks in the rock cladding that made up his powerful body.

Kane and Brigid were a dozen paces away from the stone god now, with Clem following a little way behind them, examining the coral weave of the floor and the unusual glowing pods set within that lit the room in a dusklike glow. This close, they could see that the limbs reaching down to Ullikummis's skull had affected a crownlike design, encircling his monstrous head in a tangle of thorny lines. Several thin tendrils appeared to have drilled into the side of his head, where the temples would be on a normal human skull, and as Kane looked around he saw more of the tendrils emerging from the back of the sleeping god's skull.

“Looks pretty full on,” he remarked, and Brigid snorted.

A moment later, taking a dozen paces away from the static form of the stone-clad Annunaki, Kane raised his right hand, the retractable Sin Eater appearing there with automated precision.

“Kane,” Brigid yelled, “what are you doing?”

“Offing one problem while we have the chance,” he justified, aiming the fourteen-inch pistol at Ullikummis's static head.

“Fool me once,” Kane growled at the unconscious, ugly form held in the sights of his gun, “shame on you. Fool me twice…”

“Wait, don't,” Brigid urged.

Kane turned and glared at her. “What are you talking about, Baptiste? This asshole almost turned you into a combat zombie and you're—”

“Kane, no,” Brigid said as she placed her hand over the muzzle of his weapon.

Kane had known Brigid Baptiste for a long time, and he trusted her implicitly. They had been in situations that defied a rational man's belief, had fought enemies whose description and purpose challenged even the most enlightened of thinkers. Deep in his core, Kane would always trust Brigid Baptiste's decisions. Indeed, he would trust her with his life. But now, as he looked into her beautiful emerald eyes and saw the fear burning there, he found himself questioning her sanity. She had eaten that strange mollusk, he reminded himself, and it had affected her for a while. Maybe the effects were still there somehow, still making her see things that weren't real.

“We don't get chances like this every day, Baptiste,” he spat, and a familiar voice from behind him agreed.

“I see us a quick way to end a whole lot of heartache,” Grant rumbled, checking the breech of his Copperhead assault rifle before he leveled it at the resting form of the stone monster on the thronelike protrusion.

“No,” Brigid explained. “Whatever Ullikummis is doing here it's somehow linked to the current, rapid erosion of the structure of the library itself.”

Grant cocked an eyebrow, his subgun still poised at the stone god who appeared to be asleep amid the network of organic wiring. “Want to try again in English?” he suggested.

“Right now Ullikummis is a part of the library,” Brigid surmised, “and his thirst for knowledge is breaking it apart.”

Kane lowered his gun a fraction of an inch, eyeing Brigid. “You're saying that in accessing the information stored here he's destroying it? I'm no archivist, but that's a pretty tough limitation on a library.”

“I guess it's more like a packed storehouse,” Brigid said. “Move the pieces in the wrong arrangement, and everything comes tumbling down around your ears.”

“Which sounds like all the more reason to off him, right here and now,” Kane reasoned.

“If you kill him now, that death could ripple through the whole structure,” Brigid proposed, “destroying the library and, in turn, destroying ‘the real.'”

Kane sighed heavily at the phrase, recalling how Balam had explained it just a couple of hours before. Suddenly, the gun felt like so much deadweight in Kane's hand. Beside him, Grant turned to Kane as if waiting for the kill order.

“We have to remember Balam's warning,” Brigid reminded them both. “This whole place holds the very structure, the fabric
behind
reality, together. Maybe killing Ullikummis while he's hooked into this thing would be fine, but I don't want to take any unnecessary risks. Do you?”

“I suppose,” Clem added from behind the main group, “that in this instance it would be best to leave sleeping gods lie.”