by James Axler
As the creature barrelled toward Kane across the hardpacked floor, it eerily made no noise. Kane watched in horror as his bullets banged against the side of the monstrous form, snapping against its scaled hide before bouncing off in all directions, sparks bursting across its flesh like sheet lightning. And then it was all but upon him, and Kane rolled out of its path as its feet scrabbled to seek purchase among the ridges of the floor.
The scaly creature ran several more steps before turning in what appeared to be an almost immediate right-angle turn that defied belief. It reminded Kane not so much of a mammal as something else, something he couldn’t quite place.
What the hell have we found? Kane asked himself as he brought the Sin Eater to bear once more on the hideous-looking creature as it chased him.
“More company! Stay sharp,” Grant shouted as Kane took aim at the hurtling creature that was rushing at him across the coral.
Kane didn’t need his friend’s warning; he was already aware that a second creature had emerged from the hole that now sat at his back.
“Baptiste,” Kane said, keeping his voice low even as he engaged his Commtact in preference of shouting across the room.
“I heard shooting,” Brigid’s urgent voice came back, echoing through Kane’s skull implant. Her concern was clear even through the artificial medium of the Commtact system.
“You may want to get yourself moving,” Kane advised as he pumped another handful of bullets at the hurtling, green-scaled creature and watched them ricochet off in all directions. “Seems we have us some local interest.”
As Kane spoke, his fearsome opponent leaped off the floor on those powerful legs, its double jaw opening as it sought to bite at his face. The jaw split large enough, Kane saw, to engulf his whole head.
“Can you keep our company busy?” Brigid urged over the Commtact. “We’re making real headway here.”
Kane held the trigger down on the Sin Eater, rolling aside once more as the short, doglike creature hurtled overhead, missing him by mere inches. “Say again?”
“We’re onto something over here,” Brigid explained, “and I don’t think it can be rushed.”
As the creature landed, Grant blasted a shot from his own weapon, driving a clutch of 4.85 mm shells into its flank. The creature was forced sideways with the power of the shots, and it seemed to turn in on itself as it struggled to remain upright. There was no time to follow up the successful attack, however—the second creature had emerged from the gap in the wall and was hurtling toward Kane’s supine form even as a third creature came charging out of the hole.
“Beg to differ on that one, Baptiste,” Kane growled, spraying the wall with bullets as he tried desperately to find his fast-moving targets. “I think we just woke up the local guard dogs, so it’s really going to have to be ‘go-go’ now.”
ACROSS THE FAR SIDE of the chamber, hidden between two struts of the mighty funnel-like structure that formed the hub of the Ontic Library, Brigid turned to Clem, relating what she knew from the brief radio communiqué with Kane. Clem had no subdermal Commtact, relying on a portable unit with earpiece instead when out in the field.
“Seems we’re even more on the clock than we initially thought, Clem,” she explained.
“That’s treacherously bad,” Clem mused as he wrenched at another piece of the armorlike shell of the hub with his little blade. “Absolutely dreadful.”
NEARBY, THE STONE FORM of Ullikummis remained resolutely immobile, eerily still amid the sounds of gunfire that echoed through the strange undersea chamber. With a body clad in stone, that utter, eerie stillness granted the rogue Annunaki the resolute appearance of a statue, something carved, created at the hands of another.
And this, too, was true, albeit after a fashion. A tool employed in the art of assassination, Ullikummis had been created like any other tool. The Annunaki were masters of genetic manipulation, and the form that Ullikummis now wore was one that had been deliberately built around the structure of his once flawless reptilian form.
Those things that had rendered Ullikummis different from his brethren had made him immune to the demands that life put upon them. Like all Annunaki, he was dismissive of man’s limited concept of time, for his own lifespan was near infinite. His need for things like breath and sustenance seemed almost nonexistent, for what was the good of living forever if it demanded constant refuelling of the body?
Thus, he sat in silence, an air of such utter stillness upon him that he seemed not so much a dead thing as a thing that had never been alive, a pebble washed up on the beach. But as he sat, that air of meditative tranquillity around him in the heart of the gunfire, the information fed into him from the nerve center of the Ontic Library, information he would employ to change the world.
SKIPPING BACK FROM THE wall, Grant unleashed five devastating bursts of gunfire in quick succession at the emerging creature as it nosed out of the low gap in the wall. The shots lit the air like fireworks, smashing against the platelike scales of the thing’s face and shoulders before whizzing off into the air in potentially lethal ricochets.
Unharmed and unfazed, the green-skinned creature looked at Grant with its soulless black orbs, the hard skin around them tautening as if narrowing its eyes in anger.
Grant pumped the trigger of his Copperhead, blasting another half-dozen rounds at the creature as it scented the air. It let out no noise; none of them did. Instead they appeared to be voiceless, the only noises they made coming from their strange, flat-spread feet as they scrabbled and slapped against the hard floor of the undersea base. In creating no sound, the creatures seemed that much more alien and nightmarish, like something subliminal.
A few feet from Grant, Kane had got himself back to a standing position and was warily tracking another of the green-scaled creatures as it padded across the room, sizing the ex-Mags up with grim determination.
The first dog-size creature—the one whose flank had been drilled by a flurry of bullets from Grant’s gun—was prowling at a wary distance, its dark, watery eyes never leaving the two humans it had found in its undersea territory.
As Kane tracked the nearest, it flipped its large, well-muscled back legs and sprang off the ground, hurtling toward him like a rocket, its body writhing through the air. Kane squeezed the trigger of his Sin Eater, holding it down as it spit fire at the leaping, writhing monstrosity. Then, to Kane’s astonishment, the green-scaled thing seemed to flip in midleap, turning around on itself and—incredibly—disappearing in front of his eyes.
“What the—?” Kane snarled as the thing winked from sight before him. He released his finger from the Sin Eater’s trigger, skipping backward hurriedly as he maneuvered out of his projected path for the leaping horror.
Ten feet away, Grant was blasting shot after shot at his own green-skinned foe as it rushed at him, leaping into the air, its curious double jaws opening like the wide mouth of a cave, spiny needlelike protrusions snapping at the air. At the last possible instant, Grant ducked and watched as the chimerical beast buzzed past him before plummeting back toward the ground. But to Grant’s confusion, the thing never landed. Instead, just like Kane’s foe’s impossible move a few seconds before, it seemed to flip in on itself and—blink!—it was gone.
From close by, Kane was shouting an instruction to his trusted partner, his blue-gray eyes searching for the disappearing creatures. “Grant,” Kane called, his voice snapping with urgency. “We have us another problem.”
“Tell me about it,” Grant agreed as he looked warily around for his own disappearing foe. “Seems these things have the ability to turn invisible.”
Before Kane could agree, one of the green-scaled creatures reappeared right before him, just two feet from his torso, and barreled into him as it hurtled through the air.
Chapter 19
Losing his footing, Kane spun in a lopsided tangle of limbs as he tried to fend off the green-skinned monster that had reappeared before his eyes. Together the two of them fell backward, colliding w
ith the floor with a loud crash.
Immediately Kane rolled to his left, bringing up his pistol in an automatic reaction and snapping off three quick shots as the broad-headed creature lurched at him. Its weird, key-shaped face seemed to split apart as its twin jaws yawned open, snapping at the spot where Kane had been just a fraction of a second earlier. There had been no time to aim, and Kane watched with a sense of triumph as two of his three bullets found their target, drilling into the monster’s mouth and what passed for its right cheek, just below its staring, inhuman eye. The thing reared backward on its thick, muscular hind legs, shaking its head either in pain or frustration.
There was no time for jubilation, however. Even as Kane brought his gun up for another shot, another creature charged at him, its jaws snapping. Again, Kane was struck by the weird nature of these things, even as he rolled out of the way of the savage beast’s charge. They were silent in their attacks. Never once had any of them let loose a cry or a howl in the usual way that wild animals would vocalize to intimidate their prey. He shoved the thought to the back of his mind as he brought the Sin Eater to bear, blasting a stream of 9 mm steel-jacketed death at his would-be devourer.
A little way behind Kane and off to his left, he could hear Grant tackling his own foe as another monster seemingly reappeared from the ether.
What the hell are we facing? Kane wondered.
BRIGID WATCHED AS Clem Bryant unpicked another small section of the towering organic construction that they had termed ‘the hub,’ using his short knife to score the shell-like skin before levering it away. Off in the distance, they could hear the familiar sounds of gunfire as Kane and Grant tackled the weird creatures that had emerged from the hole in the wall.
“Here,” Clem said, a clear note of triumph to his tone, “this is where it links to our visiting friend.”
Brigid looked at where Clem pointed, and she saw a thick veinlike tube amid an interweaving of lesser veiny threads. “What is that?” she asked.
Clem smiled. “A vein,” he stated. “If this were a normal octopus, that would be running blood to the gills for oxygenation. But if you follow its path along, it links to the feeder tubes here and here—” he pointed with the tip of his knife “—that lead to the structure that surrounds Ullikummis’s head.”
Brigid narrowed her eyes as she followed the path of the vein, trying to imagine it in terms of an anatomical plan for the creature before her. Clem had only removed sections of the shell-like covering here and there, but there were enough pieces exposed to show that the same vein ran to the weird-looking crown atop Ullikummis’s stone head.
Brigid turned back to Clem and asked anxiously, “What does it mean?”
“Anatomy of an octopus,” Clem explained, counting things off on his fingers as he spoke. “Three hearts, yes? You have the main heart, then two branchial hearts that deal with pumping blood to the gills for oxygenation. It’s an adaptation that allows for octopi to survive in the pressured ocean depths.”
“Faster,” Brigid reminded.
“Instead of blood,” Clem stated, “this creature is pumping information—knowledge—which is being tapped by Ullikummis. Now, if we follow the logic of that, there must be at least one more stream that can be tapped in a similar fashion without interfering with the first.”
“Go on,” Brigid encouraged, trying to keep Clem’s idea straight in her head.
“This would, of course, make a degree of sense,” Clem said. “Rather than having a backup system for the most precious knowledge store on the planet, you have a twin system—the two branchial hearts—which can reinforce each other at any moment in time. If, as with an octopus, there’s also a third heart—the main heart—then the two branchial servers would act as feeders, and were perhaps designed to be tapped while the main heart is the central processing unit, or CPU.”
Brigid nodded, finally beginning to see what Clem was getting at. In terms of an archival system, something Brigid was very familiar with from her days as an archivist in Cobaltville, the main heart took the role of the master store, where everything would be kept. The branchial hearts were access points, which could relate information from the main store without requiring the physical removal of materials, like computer terminals within a reference library. “Could we jump one to the other?” Brigid asked.
“How would that work?” Clem wondered.
“If we flipped the streams over,” Brigid proposed, “we could control Ullikummis’s stream and potentially feed choice information to him, driving him from the system.”
“Guiding the strands of knowledge,” Clem said in realization, recalling Brigid’s earlier, rudimentary proposition. “You’d be effectively applying computer theory to a physical being…”
“A physical being that operates as a computer,” Brigid pointed out, “or more accurately, a whole bank of computers.”
“One would need to have an exceptional knowledge of how to operate the system,” Clem mused.
“Clem,” Brigid said firmly, “I was an archivist for a long time. You get me in there and I’ll make it work. Or die trying.”
“That’s the sort of attitude that I try to avoid,” Clem said jovially, “which is probably why I haven’t been assigned my own CAT team.”
Brigid leaned forward for a moment, holding a steadying hand over Clem’s own. “Do what you can, Clem,” she said reassuringly, “but do it quick.”
GRANT LEAPED BACK ON the balls of his feet as the monstrous, dog-size creature pounced at him from some impossible spot in mid-air. A moment before, the thing hadn’t existed, he would swear, and yet here it was, right before his eyes, hurtling at his face with its maw wide, showing the vicious rows of teethlike spines within.
Grant analyzed in a fraction of a second that he was too close to use the Copperhead now, so he swung it up, using the stubby back end like a nightstick, striking upward with a blow that slammed against the rushing creature’s jaw. The attacker’s jaw snapped painfully shut with the force of Grant’s unforgiving blow, and it wavered in the air for a moment before falling to the ground and sliding a few feet across the rough surface of the floor. Without hesitation, Grant turned the Copperhead on the creature once more, snapping off twin shots at its face as it turned to look at him. One shot hit the platelike armor of its scaly skin, whizzing back at Grant just a few inches over his head, while the other drilled into one of its soulless black eyes, bursting the eyeball.
For a moment, the creature stalled, lurching in place as its ruined eyeball spurted across its face like drool. Then, rotating its head, it peered at Grant with its remaining eye, feet drumming against the ground as it charged at him once again.
Meanwhile, just ten feet from his partner, Kane found himself facing off against two of the weird, scaly creatures. Both of them circled him, following a slightly erratic, almost zigzag path as they rounded on him.
Kane felt a sense of helplessness as they bided their time, preparing for another attack. It was clear they were sentries dispatched to expel unwanted visitors to the undersea base. Balam had described the Ontic Library as a living thing, and the strange shellfish should have tipped Kane off to the sort of utter weirdness he would find here. But, somehow, he found himself both fascinated and repulsed by what he was facing, his mind unable to easily label it and hence deal with it.
Suddenly one of the creatures—the one with the wound in its cheek from Kane’s mouth shot—rushed him once more, its thick back legs punching against the floor as it drove furiously toward him. Behind it, the second monster was moving, too, following its charging brother, an ugly gash at its side where Grant’s shots had grazed its scales.
Scales, Kane realized with a start.
And then the two monsters were upon him, and he found himself dropping back as they powered overhead.
Kane blasted a lethal stream of bullets at the first creature, the blasts popping against its underbelly as it rushed past him before it twisted and, once again, disappeared from view. Kane paid it
no mind; he was too busy kicking out at the second monster as it came at him from a lower angle, its weird double-jaw arrangement open wide in terrifying promise.
Kane’s boot smashed into the creature’s jaw, just skirting below the needle-sharp teeth and clipping it at the point of its lower muzzle. The thing seemed to whirl in place, its momentum driving it onward as it dispelled kinetic energy in a sudden frantic waggling of its tiny forearms.
Kane snapped off another burst of bullets as the green-skinned creature flew past him before performing a strange right-angle turn and disappearing from view. “Fish,” he snarled. “We’re dealing with fucking fish.”
CLEM AND BRIGID RUSHED hastily around the towering hub, searching for another point where they might tap in and access the organic system. Clem swiftly identified and traced the main trunk of the second vein, the one that led back to the second branchial heart of the beastlike machine.
Brigid, meantime, located a plinthlike section of the hub that seemed similar to the place where Ullikummis was wired in. This plinth seemed to almost perfectly mirror the one that Ullikummis had used as a seat, and was set at roughly the opposing side of the colossal, towering hub.
“We’ll do it here,” Brigid called to Clem as he continued eyeing the second vein, tracing it amid the hard covering of the octopuslike organism.