by James Axler
There was a palpable air of excitement in the pilgrims’ rugged transport now. The passengers had been gathered from a specified pickup point where they had been instructed to wait after being recruited at one of the numerous public sermons given by the stone adherents.
The wag was twenty feet long, with a wire frame over which strips of canvas had been laid to protect the travelers from the icy torrent that fell from the skies. The vehicle was unpainted, leaving the metallic frame gleaming darkly, and it featured seven wheels including a rear-mounted steering assist to tackle the rougher ground around the worship site. In the two hundred years since the nukecaust, the paved roads had fallen into disrepair, and sites like the one this wag was heading toward were poorly served by existing communications links. As Brigid had pointed out, the last time she had been here it had been a farmer’s field—and that had been less than eighteen months ago.
Brakes groaned as the transport pulled to a halt. Up ahead, Kane could see that the gravel road became wider, the standing stones funneling outward to leave a broad, circular expanse of gravel in the center of which was the towering structure with the red eye. The tower was roughly three or four stories—or thirty-five feet—high and built with straight, slightly rounded sides as if some baton had been shoved into the soil. It was phallic, Kane thought, but that didn’t come as any surprise—he had seen plenty of temples to the gods, and the phallus was a recurring theme. The baton-like structure was carved from dark stone like the standing stones, while dotted along its sides were streaks of polished red-orange glass. A single red glass circle had been placed close to the tower’s pinnacle, like a mighty eye staring down on the people below. This “eye” faced into the sun, drawing its rays inside the structure itself.
Kane recognized that design, too—it drew from the familiar pattern used in the nine baronies, the red circle atop the Administration Monolith that gave the citizens the impression that they were being watched at all times. One of the more insidious ways in which the stone adherents of Ullikummis operated was to take the familiar iconography of the baronies and twist it to their own ends—hence the cycloptic eye in the tower and the use of the breast badge that was familiar to anyone who had seen a Magistrate uniform.
“Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble to make this place seem special,” Kane muttered to Brigid as he let the gap in the canvas slip closed again.
At the same time, one of the robed adherents addressed the group from the rear of the wag, close to the open gate at which passengers embarked and debarked, speaking in a bold voice. “Chosen of stone, we walk from here,” he explained, “to truly appreciate the majesty of his birthplace, as is the will of the infinite lord.”
“Will, my ass,” Kane muttered from the side of his mouth as he and Brigid joined the other passengers, filing toward the open rear of the stopped vehicle.
A moment later, the first of the pilgrims stepped from the transport, dropping down to the rain-wet gravel a few feet below. In less than a minute, everyone had disembarked from the wagon, and they clustered on the gravel in the lee of the baton-like tower, Kane and Brigid among them. The group were excited but they adopted a reverential silence as they strode across the ground before the grand structure, staring up at it in awe. To them, this was a place of incredible religious significance—the birthplace of Ullikummis, their savior, their god.
To all, that is, except for Kane and Brigid, of course; they were here to scope out the site and see whether something dangerous was building here, well out of sight of the crumbling baronies that had split North America into nine territories of harsh and subtle control. They had faced Ullikummis before—fought him and stopped him before he could take over the world.
A little over a year ago, a large meteor had crash-landed here. From within that meteor had emerged Ullikummis, a member of an alien race of creatures called the Annunaki who had posed as gods several millennia ago, and deceived humankind into worshipping them. Ullikummis had been an outcast of his own people, imprisoned in the meteor and flung into space, only to return five thousand years later and rain havoc on the world in his fury at what had been done to him. When he reappeared, Ullikummis had sown the seeds of a new religion, one dedicated to his worship and that granted its users incredible—almost supernatural—control of their physical bodies. But he had been opposed by the brave warriors of Cerberus, who had seen the worst that the Annunaki race was capable of, and realized the wicked intentions at the heart of the stone god’s plans. In retaliation, Ullikummis had almost destroyed the Cerberus organization, infiltrating their headquarters and brainwashing several of their number, including Brigid Baptiste. However, the monster had finally been destroyed by Kane, thrown into the sun using a teleportational rig.
Although Ullikummis had been defeated, his worshippers continued to blindly follow his teachings, creating a new and growing cult in his name. Kane and Brigid had initially been dispatched to check the site of the fallen meteor prison, but on discovering it was now an impenetrable and highly guarded temple dedicated to Ullikummis the stone god, they had gone undercover, infiltrating the congregation at a mass in his name before joining this pilgrimage to the site itself.
“Roundabout way to see a hunk of space rock,” Kane grumbled to Brigid as they joined the others on the walk to the temple’s entry itself.
“It’s not as if we had anything better to do,” Brigid replied, wiping aside a sodden curl of flame-red hair.
Kane had no answer to that. He just tried to resist the urge to check that he was still armed.
More adherents waited at the doors, dressed in the familiar robes of coarse fabric, red shield on the breast, hoods up against the chill and rain. Beyond them, a tall archway led into the tower itself, open but set deep into the structure so that the punishing rain would not go straight inside. There were other pilgrims, too, another smaller group just entering the grand archway, their own transport parked up to the side of the gravel pen. Several of the group stopped before the archway and knelt, bowing so that they touched their foreheads to the ground in a gesture of absolute supplication.
Kane and Brigid were ushered along with the rest of their party, making their way toward the arch. “Think we ought to bow?” Kane asked, whispering the question from the side of his mouth.
Brigid didn’t reply, but instead dropped to her knees in the wet gravel and began pleading to the stone god to help her and the world he so loved. Kane was impressed—if he didn’t know better, he’d be convinced she was buying into this stone cult nonsense, hook, line and sinker.
They passed through the archway and entered a lobby-like area, which opened out into the main chamber of the tower. The lobby was eight paces end to end, but ran entirely around the base of the tower in a complete circuit. It was divided from the main chamber by thick stone pillars, rough-surfaced and tightly packed so that only a sliver of the main room could be seen through them. The pillars were so closely spaced that only one or two people could pass between them into the main chamber at any one time, which meant that the lobby momentarily became a bottleneck as the group of thirty-one passed through.
Within, the tower felt warm after the icy rain, and Kane took a moment just to breathe in the air. It had a scent to it, a trace of burning, like toast left too long under the grill.
It was darker inside, too, even after the dullness of the overcast day. The tower had no formal windows, only ragged lines cut into the external walls. Each of these lines had been filled with red-orange glass, giving a kind of fiery half-light to the interior. It felt a little like stepping into a volcano. Kane jolted, recognizing the quality of that light: when Ullikummis had penetrated Cerberus’s defences and taken control of their headquarters, he had reshaped it into something he had dubbed Life Camp Zero, a cross between a prison and a reeducation center. The walls of the Cerberus redoubt had been masked by living rock, the light fixtures replaced with bubbles of volcanic fir
e, casting everything in a hot orange glow. This place—this temple—had that same glow. It disoriented Kane for a moment—he had been a prisoner in Life Camp Zero, had suffered terribly at the hands of his jailers before ultimately turning the tables and killing them. He didn’t think much about that period of his life—when he had absorbed an obedience stone into his body and momentarily sacrificed his independence to Ullikummis so that he could escape.
Brigid, too, had sacrificed her independence to Ullikummis, though for her it was involuntary. Ullikummis had held her in a cell in a sea fortress called Bensalem, where he had twisted her thought processes, brainwashing her into seeing things in a new and inhuman way—the way of the Annunaki. Brigid’s senses had been overwhelmed with the psychic onslaught and she had finally given up, hiding her real personality in a higher plane of consciousness and letting her body be possessed by her wicked Annunaki self—an abomination called Brigid Haight. The evil she had committed as Haight still haunted her, even though she had had no control of her actions.
“Kane, you’ve stopped,” Brigid said quietly, pushing her hand gently against her partner’s back.
Kane shook his head. “Sorry, I was miles away,” he admitted. “The light kind of...brings it all back.”
Brigid nodded once in understanding. “The stone lord is still with us,” she said, raising her voice so that the people around her could hear. No matter how disconcerting this experience was, she and Kane had to remember that they were here undercover; that for all intents and purposes, they were just two more pilgrims hoping to find salvation in the wisdom of the stone god.
A moment later, the Cerberus warriors had moved past the pillars and into the depths of the temple. The fiery glow was brighter here, the light shimmering a little as if it were alive—an illusion from the passing clouds and the rain on the slivers of red glass.
The interior chamber was circular and of moderate but impressive size, like a midsize conference room or a small theater, able to hold perhaps eighty people before it felt crowded. Just now, Kane estimated, there were fifty pilgrims here, plus a half-dozen acolytes, easily identifiable by their robes and red insignias. However, the room’s proportions seemed more impressive because it stretched all the way up through to the height of the tower, rising thirty-five feet into the air in a grand column, where the giant red eye glared outward and in, casting a red oval disc across a spot on the floor. That red spot highlighted a huge brown rock standing in the very center of the chamber. The rock was almost circular but it had split down the middle to reveal a hollow interior, the two sides pulled apart by incredible force. The rock was as large as a Sherman tank, and where Kane could see the interior he saw that the walls were thick, despite its hollow center. This had been the prison cell of Ullikummis, launched into space millennia ago, returning to Earth less than two years ago and bringing its sole prisoner back home. The rock was surrounded by a circle of hard-packed earth, beyond which the floor had been paved with large slabs of slate.
Across to one side stood a caldron pit, blistering with flames, their heat emanating throughout the room.
There was one other item in this central chamber besides the caldron and the rock, and it transfixed Brigid Baptiste from the moment she walked through the gap in the pillars. It was an exquisitely carved alabaster statue of a woman, a third again life-size, standing with arms outstretched as though to welcome someone into a hug. The woman was slim and tall, with long legs and a cloak over her shoulders that draped down past her knees. She wore a skintight catsuit that, in reality, would have hugged every curve of her svelte, athletic form. The catsuit had been painted in a glossy black, like a beetle’s wing. The face had been left unpainted, the white alabaster shining pink in the glow from the fire windows, but the lion’s mane of hair had been daubed with color—a rich red-gold like a halo of living flames.
Brigid gasped as she saw the statue. “Kane, look!” she said.
Kane turned, eyeing the statue in admiration.
“It’s Haight,” Brigid whispered. “It’s...me.”
Designated Task #004: Manufacturing
Like all villes, manufacturing is performed here at Epsilon Level. I have been assigned to a work crew of twenty people who perform the repetitive tasks of sorting, assembling and checking the parts necessary for the construction of the Sandcats. The Sandcats are sprayed white, better to camouflage them in the snow, and their tracks are rigorously tested to ensure they have sufficient grip for the treacherous icy conditions that exist beyond the ville walls.
Each Sandcat is armed with the standard array of twin USMG-73 heavy machine guns set in a blister turret above the blocky body of the vehicle itself. These guns are automated, with a linked positronic brain connecting engine to guns—this way, the engine may steer in a direction advantageous to combat as well as pursuit or retreat.
The workshop itself is noisy with the sounds of construction, welding, sifting and hammering that make up the assembling of the vehicles. No chatter is permitted from the shop floor, so I know my fellow workers only by sight rather than by name. We share occasional nods when our eyes meet, but most citizens are diligent in their work and have no cause to look up except during the brief transition periods when their shift begins and ends. At these moments, I observe my fellow workers with quiet admiration, proud of what we have achieved in a given shift.
Each shift is nine hours in total with three designated breaks. Breaks are staggered across the workforce so that the production line never ceases, and no two members of the production line are assigned a break at the same time. The three breaks are fifteen, twenty and fifteen minutes, the two shorter breaks arranged during the top and tail of the day. In these breaks, workers are provided with nutrition and water, and are allowed a comfort break of no more than four minutes. Self-decontamination is expected after any comfort break.
The rest area is slight, a small “room” shielded from the main floor of the factory by low barricades, effectively penning the worker in from the shop floor. The noise of the factory is immense in these moments, when one is trying to relax and imbibe sufficient nutrients to continue the important task.
Citizens travel to and from the factory via trolleybus or on foot, depending on the location of their residence and on the location of their designated activities before or after their shift. For two evenings of each week I am assigned to Designated Task #011—cleaning duties—after my shift, which take an additional 3.7 hours. This is for the good of the ville. Post-shift on other days, I have a rota of tasks to attend to, including Designated Tasks #008, #012 and #013.
—From the journal of Citizen 619F.
Chapter 2
From warrior to traitor to legend—Brigid could barely process the path her life had taken. To find her effigy here, standing beside the rock that had brought these people’s god to Earth, was unsettling. She had worked for Ullikummis, acting as his “hand in the darkness” while he made a power grab to revive his mother, Ninlil, and gain control of the Annunaki pantheon. Brigid had kidnapped the hybrid child Quav, within whom the genetic template for Ninlil resided, betraying and almost killing her trusted friends in the process. She had even shot Kane, and only his shadow suit coupled with a rejuvenating pool called the Chalice of Rebirth had ensured his survival. It had been a dark time for Brigid, darker than she could bear. Her essence, her personality—even the thing that some religions might call her soul—had hidden away from the whole debacle, and had only been released when a trigger had been engaged—a trigger that had acted almost as a rebirth for Brigid Baptiste herself. So to find her dark aspect, the creature called Brigid Haight, worshipped here as some kind of—what?—demigoddess, was unnerving.
Brigid felt the tug of Kane’s hand on her arm, turned to see his stern face. “Come on, Baptiste,” he encouraged in a low voice, “people’ll notice if you’re not careful.”
“People will notice,” Bri
gid repeated, barely mouthing the words. What a turn of events that would be—for all these believers to suddenly learn that their demigoddess, the dark hand of the stone god himself, was walking among them.
Brigid turned away from the statue, away from its idealized representation of her own stunning appearance.
Ahead, the devotees were being encouraged to walk past the broken meteor—“the cradle of the stone god,” as the acolytes called it—and show reverence and appreciation for his mighty works and promised utopia. Everyone who passed reached out to touch the rock, some trembling and weeping as they did so. Kane found the displays of emotion disturbing—he had fought Ullikummis, knew him to be nothing but an inhuman monster subjugating mankind to use for his own whims. And yet, his message had somehow taken root in the public imagination, was growing even now, many months on from the death of the monster himself. The people craved something—release from the fear that the fall of the baronies had brought, fear that the world could devolve once more into the post-nukecaust chaos that had become known as the Deathlands era. Then, survival was everything, and the strong preyed on the weak, humans turned into little more than animals—predatory, vicious animals. The Program of Unification had changed all that, a design for living that had fostered new openness and trust between people, that had created the safe havens of the nine villes that had dominated and controlled North America. The barons had brought control, often crushing and dictatorial, but a control that people desired and needed to function and to advance after those dark years. When the barons had resigned, leaving their baronies to assume their true forms as Annunaki space gods, they had left a power vacuum that was proving hard to fill. People were scared—and this, this broken rock prison with all its connotations of evil and subjugation, appealed to that fear, quelled it in a way Kane could barely comprehend.
Kane and Brigid were next to be ushered past the rock, waiting a moment as the preceding pilgrim—a woman with tangled blond hair and a baby bump—wailed at its hollow chamber, the place where Ullikummis had waited five thousand years in cramped imprisonment. “Save us,” she cried. “Show us the glory of your utopia.”