God War (4 page)

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.

* * *

G
RANT
’
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.

* * *

S
OMEWHERE
ON
THE
W
est 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.”

* * *

O
N
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.