by James Axler
She knew then, just for a second, that he didn’t want to go. Ullikummis was resisting her suggestion; he was looking around frantically, wondering at where he was.
For the briefest instant, she saw the library as he perceived it, a dead rock pyramid spinning in space, the books like ancient tablets of stone. And, for just a second, she saw her hand as he saw it, shimmering scales of crimson flushed with pink.
“All the information is right here,” Brigid said, and when Ullikummis turned to where she indicated, he saw the lone book that rested on a picnic blanket laid out on the grass by the roses, the book that Brigid had generated from everything she knew, forcing it to manifest as a physical thing. Had the library helped her to do this, guided her hand somehow, in its need for self-preservation? Was she, in fact, the library’s hand in darkness? She couldn’t say.
Ullikummis let go of her hand and ran for the book, his short legs skipping through the bright green grass.
Brigid stepped back into the archive building and gently closed the doors, turning the lock once to seal the Annunaki prince outside. And as he opened the book, she saw the look of horror snap across his child’s face, and Brigid Baptiste, willing tool of the Ontic Library, knew that she had to turn away.
Chapter 24
And then god woke up.
Kane and Grant still had their guns trained on the twitching corpse that had once been a fish when, from the corner of his eye, Kane saw Ullikummis begin to stir.
Something in Kane’s body language altered, and Grant began to ask what it was, but the corpse of the fish creature saw the change, too, and it took its chance to pounce. The muscular tail-like back legs of the green-scaled corpse propelled it into the air—alive once more—even as Kane realized his mistake.
In a fraction of a second, something slammed Kane in the chest with such a solid impact that he was knocked from his feet. As he tumbled, Kane saw the leaping fish creature spring through the space where he had been standing an instant before; Grant had pushed him out of its path with one single, frantic shove.
“Head in the game, partner,” Grant reminded Kane as he turned his Copperhead on where the beast had landed.
The corpse opened what was left of its ruined jaw, that ugly, broken hinge flopping out at a wretched angle as it chewed at the air. Grant blasted one, two, three bursts of fire at it, stepping forward with each blast and forcing the wounded creature back.
As he scrambled up from the floor, Kane’s steely-gray eyes went back to the stone giant rising from his seat at the hub of the library, pushing the thornlike crown from his ugly, misshapen skull.
“Deal with the fish,” Kane instructed his partner as he began to sprint away toward the towering hub that dominated the room’s center. “I’ve got me a god to kill.”
Grant spit a curse as he watched Kane retreat, before turning back to the deformed, moving corpse of the mutant fish that prowled on the floor, the broken stubs of its ruined limbs clicking against the hard coral. With its one remaining eye, the creature glared at Grant as he leveled the nose of the Copperhead at it.
“Come on, you ugly son of a bitch,” Grant urged. “Let’s you and me finish this.”
A second later, the creature leaped, its bottom jaw hanging wide as it rocketed toward Grant’s chest.
BRIGID WAS STILL STANDING in the palatial library, gazing about her at the wonders on show there. She wanted to read everything, to take the beautiful leather-bound books from the shelves and leaf through each one like a child opening birthday presents, delighting in new wonders. But she knew now that she must not. However the interface worked between the Ontic Library and its users, she had no comprehension of its nature. Perhaps merely by being here, she threatened to destroy it in some fundamental manner that she could not comprehend, just as Ullikummis’s fury had poisoned the things he had touched, the data he had accessed.
For a prolonged instant, Brigid gazed longingly around the tall shelves of that impossibly huge room, watching as the motes of dust danced in the sunlight that lashed through the windows, the heat radiating on her skin.
Given enough time, given instruction, Brigid could make this place work for humanity, make this exceptional database alter the course of history, repel the Annunaki alien invaders once and for all.
But then, there was no time. Potentially, her being here would generate a Heisenberg effect, her existence here irrevocably altering the very things she set out to study.
Brigid shook her head sadly as the sun played in her hair.
It was time to go.
SLOWLY, ULLIKUMMIS ROSE from his thronelike position at the side of the symbiotic library hub. He seemed confused, unwieldy, and his movements were staggered and graceless.
At full height, Ullikummis stood eight feet tall, a towering stone creature with hornlike protrusions sweeping out from his shoulders, thick legs that widened at the bottom like a tree’s trunk. The single record that did exist of his previous time on Earth, an ancient Hurrian tablet, had described him as a sentient stone pillar, towering up from the underworld to kill the god Teshub. Seeing him stand now, Kane could well believe that this ghastly, hideous rock thing could be mistaken for a pillar of stone.
There was information to digest, the stone god knew, facts that needed full appraisal before they could be employed. He had seen a way to use his abilities to create the thing he would require, a magnificent life camp. The final file had been corrupted; it had forced him from the library even as he absorbed its rogue contents. Something had gone wrong in the downloading procedure, and Ullikummis realized he had been here for too long.
The crown of wires lay on the floor between his immense stumplike feet, and Ullikummis bowed his head, staring at it as he recovered himself. The passage to and from the Ontic Library was not a sharp, simple thing, not in the way of human technology. No, this was more akin to the acquisition and shaking of a viral infection, like the common cold or influenza. It came upon the user with a strange kind of suddenness that one tried almost to deny until one was surely within its grip. And when one tried to recover from using the Ontic Library, it was like trying to shake a disease, the traces of it still in one’s system, gradually diminishing during recovery.
Ullikummis peered up then, hearing the footsteps rushing toward him across the coral floor, and he saw the familiar figure of Kane running at him, the pistol in his hand. He knew Kane from Tenth City, where the Cerberus warrior had tried to kill him. To Ullikummis at that moment, there seemed to be two or three figures, each of them the same man, blurred and shimmering like a mirage.
“Time to finish this, you worthless piece of lizard spit,” Kane snarled as he raised the barrel of the Sin Eater and began firing.
ACROSS THE VAST CHAMBER, the dead fish monster leaped at Grant through the open air, and the ex-Mag drilled a stream of shots into its undead body. The shots seemed to have no effect; it was just a war of attrition now, the dead beast unable to feel pain as great gobs of its flesh broke off and speckled the floor and walls in red.
Then the monster was on Grant, and he batted at it with the breech of the assault rifle, knocking it away through the air.
The thing didn’t land but just spun about itself, flipping on its tail-like appendages, and then it had disappeared from Grant’s sight once more.
“Fuck it,” Grant snarled as he saw the creature wink from view, his breath coming hard and fast.
Almost instantaneously, the dead creature reappeared, swimming through the air and slamming into Grant’s left bicep so hard that he was shunted sideways across the hard floor. For a moment, Grant found himself struggling to stay upright, and what remained of the horrible creature’s double jaw clamped on his left shoulder as he toppled.
Without conscious thought, Grant swung the Copperhead one-handed—one of the advantages of its bullpup design—and dug the end of its barrel into the side of the creature’s head where its eye socket peered with horrific emptiness. Then Grant pulled the trigger, driving a handful of
steel-jacketed bullets into its skull.
Grant felt the beast shake beneath the impact of the bullets as it struggled to stay clamped to his arm. Then suddenly the monstrous fish had let go, and Grant watched as it sailed across the room, his bullets chasing it as the eye socket smoldered with gun smoke. Grant felt the trigger click on empty as the creature shook beneath the impact of his bullets.
Eerily voiceless, the creature recovered, its blood-drenched feet pawing at the rough floor as it prepared to charge for Grant. His head down, eyes fixed on the fishlike abomination, Grant let the empty Copperhead drop from his hands as he stalked toward it.
The monster began to charge and, twenty feet away, Grant did, too, a mirror image to the hideous creature he faced. Head low, shoulders pumping, Grant ran at the beast, the hard-impact soles of his booted feet slamming against the coral with such intensity that chunks went flying and sharp protrusions were pounded into dust. A blue light winked off beneath Grant’s tread as he rushed past.
His attacker’s wounded feet slapped wetly against the coral floor, the two hind limbs driving it like a racehorse while the shorter forepaws struck the floor to pull it onward, affirming its direction. Then it leaped, and Grant leaped, too, his right fist pumping through the air toward the bloody wreckage that had once been the thing’s face.
As the monster’s jaws opened wide in readiness for its prey, Grant punched it across its lower jaw, hitting the thing with such force that its head snapped back and it began to flip on itself in midair.
As Grant landed, his knees folding in a recovery crouch, he called the Sin Eater to his hand from the recess of its wrist holster, unleashing a stream of high-caliber death at the monster as it flopped to the ground. A dozen rounds blasted through its ruined skull from a distance of less than three feet, rendering it nothing more than a bloody pulp atop the neckless torso. Still it sagged, struggling to find and kill its objective, the bloody remnants of its head swaying like some nightmare pendulum carved of flesh.
Grant pushed himself up off the floor, stalking toward the creature as its misshapen lump of head swayed back and forth. Then, with a savage boot, Grant punted the creature’s spoiled head from its torso, the toe of his boot ripping the last remaining vestiges of muscle away with finality.
The beast finally slumped to the floor, gunk pouring from the ruined gap where its head had once been, the viscous liquid oozing into the gaps in the coral and draining from sight. Grant ignored it, turning his attention to the far side of the central hub where Kane continued to battle with the stone god Ullikummis.
BULLETS RATTLED AGAINST the rock plates of Ullikummis’s chest with the noise of some hideous drum solo. Sparks flew up from the stone, bursting before the Annunaki prince’s vision. His eyes and his mind were beginning to recover now, taking in the world around him once more.
Fifteen feet away, the human he had met with in Saskatchewan was blasting at him with a hand pistol, in the race’s indelicate way of waging battle. Ullikummis’s burning eyes smoldered, pools of magma in his craggy face, focusing on this pathetic human. When they had met before, the human—Kane—had used some manner of explosive to force Ullikummis back, cause him to topple toward an open furnace. But Ullikummis had abilities that the human did not suspect. The genetic engineer, Lord Ningishzidda of the Annunaki, had bonded the exceptional mind powers of the child to a telekinesis program, allowing him control over rock. To some it had seemed magic.
Kane continued to blast shots at his towering stone foe, the Sin Eater kicking in his hands as he steadied it with a two-handed grip. The last time they had fought, Ullikummis had been covered in flames, and the fire had licked across his rock shell with willful glee, as if it could kill a thing made of stone. His city—the City of Ten—had been destroyed, however, and there had been nothing left but rubble, all thanks to Kane and his team.
As the bullets batted harmlessly against his rock skin, Ullikummis strode forward, his great tree-trunk legs crashing determinedly against the floor as the sounds of gunfire filled the air.
Kane watched in growing irritation as his bullets had no effect on the stone thing that towered before him. Last time he had used explosives to fell Ullikummis, but he could not do that here for fear of damaging this precious archive of facts. The stone god raised one of his jagged hands, the fingers like escarpments carved by the sea, and the bullets rattled ineffectively against the palm of his hand.
Kane had forgotten how quick Ullikummis was. In an instant, the stone monster closed the gap between himself and the ex-Mag, moving ten feet in the blink of an eye. His stone hand powered forward, batting Kane’s Sin Eater aside as bullets continued to rattle against it.
“Submit,” the stone god instructed, his fierce eyes glowing with the red liquid flames of magma.
“Never,” Kane spit back, ducking as the stone god swept a mighty arm at his head.
Kane was trained in many different arts of combat, his body geared to endless adaptation in the heat of battle. Even a stone god, he reasoned, was subject to the laws of gravity. Even here, twelve miles beneath the surface of the ocean, a stone god would fall if pushed.
Kane’s outstretched leg swept out, knocking against Ullikummis’s monstrous shin in a blow that felt for all the world like kicking the trunk of a solid oak tree.
And then—remarkably—the stone god fell. Ullikummis was still disoriented from his trip through the Ontic Library and his sudden ejection. What advantage that gave Kane, no one could truly say, but for one incredible instant, the combat prowess of one man proved enough to topple an ancient god.
The sound that Ullikummis’s heavy body made as it crashed to the floor of the Ontic Library was like a mighty redwood being felled in a forest. The whole undersea base itself seemed to shake, and the strange, living blue-and-green lights flickered and dimmed for several seconds, winking on and off as if in sympathy to the felled giant.
Kane looked across to where his foe had fallen, feeling the reverberations of that savage blow run through his leg, stinging the muscles at his groin.
Grant was rushing over then, his own Sin Eater held ready, skipping lightly on the balls of his feet as he kept Ullikummis’s fallen form in his sights. “Everything okay?” Grant asked, not really knowing what else he could say.
Kane began to reply, struggling to lift himself to his feet. Suddenly Ullikummis moved, one of those mighty arms lashing out with incredible swiftness. The stone arm met with Kane’s side as he stood, slapping the ex-Mag back down with an almighty blow. Kane unleashed a pained growl as he was tossed across the bumpy, uneven floor.
When he looked up again, Kane saw that Ullikummis was standing, his impressive stone form looming majestically over his partner. Grant pointed his Sin Eater at the godlike creature, but Kane could see the hesitation there—Grant didn’t believe his blaster could have any effect on this incredible figure. He was most probably right, Kane realized. They had been foolish to challenge the stone god, needed far superior weaponry and planning to take on such an exceptional specimen of power. And meantime, Brigid Baptiste was wired into this ghastly library, her whole body at risk from a stray shot, her mind caught in its grip.
Reluctantly, Kane issued the order as he struggled up from the floor. “Let him go,” he said. “We can only lose here.”
Slowly, the irritation clear on his puckered brow, Grant lowered his pistol. Ullikummis continued to watch him, with all the calm fascination of a man watching an animal in a cage at the zoo, knowing that animal could never break through the bars to reach him.
Then, without a word, the stone god turned, and his fiery eyes looked at Kane as if to assess him.
“Go,” Kane said, “before I change my mind.”
Ullikummis looked at the human whom he dwarfed, and his stony expression showed no change. Yet, for just a moment, Kane sensed something in those flaming eyes of lava—and it looked like pity. For all his talk, for all his bravado and his determination to put his people before the destruction of this
false god, Kane knew in that moment that it was nothing more than evasion. He was no more important to this magnificent, towering being than an insect was to a man.
As that thought began to sink in, Kane watched Ullikummis stride from the chamber, his huge, lumbering form stalking toward the sole exit of the undersea structure. Kane listened for an awful moment as the stone behemoth’s heavy steps echoed down the corridor of spiders, like the sounds of heavy construction. And then the stone Annunaki prince was gone.
It didn’t matter. Maybe they had lost; Kane wasn’t sure. Only Brigid Baptiste could tell them if their plan had been successful.
“Baptiste,” Kane whispered, making his way past Grant and over to where Brigid was still sitting, wired into the Ontic hub, “you had damn well better be all right.”
Chapter 25
Disengage.
Suddenly, with a snap like fire on the skin, Brigid found herself ejected from the Ontic Library, thrown from the vastness of its infallible knowledge base, with all the force of a cork firing from a champagne bottle.
Around her, strands of knowledge, buds and growths of new ideas and theorems raced past, hurtling at a million miles a picosecond, buzzing past her ears and her eyes and her nostrils, the smell of facts so strong she could taste them at the back of her throat.
Brigid thought she might be sick. Worse, her heart was pounding so hard in her chest that she thought it might explode. It felt like a hammer pounding against a wall, threatening to burst through in a blast of ruined flesh and bone.
Her head, by contrast, sang. It sang with a hundred thousand ideas; it sang with all the possibilities of the things she had seen, the briefest of things that she had learned here in the Ontic Library. For an archivist to immerse herself in a pool of ultimate knowledge was an incredible thing, and a part of Brigid never wanted to leave.