Truth Engine

by James Axler

“They attacked like locusts,” she explained. “Swarmed through the redoubt before we could respond. I watched on the monitors as they surged through the doors like a tidal wave. A tidal wave of people.”

  “It makes no sense,” Brigid argued. “How could they just walk in?”

  Domi raised her hands in a gesture of defeat, the Detonics Combat Master still clutched in her right fist. “They did—that’s all I know. It was so quick, Brigid. You wouldn’t believe.”

  “They must have planned it, then,” Grant growled from where he was checking on one of the rooms that led off from the main artery. The room was empty, but the thin pool of blood was spreading across the floor even here.

  Kane turned to Domi as the foursome continued hurrying along the wide corridor, he and Grant checking the side rooms with brutal efficiency in a standard Magistrate sweep pattern. “They must have got to the generator,” he surmised. “That’s why the lights are on the fritz. But I don’t get it—why didn’t anyone stop them?”

  “We tried, Kane,” Domi told him hotly. “There are dead people all about—you notice that?”

  Kane stopped, looking about him as if for the first time. The blood, the bodies, the ruin of familiar places. It seemed faintly unreal.

  “Kane,” Grant called, standing in the doorway of one of the rooms. “You need to see…”

  Kane had hurried over to join his partner, Brigid and Domi just a step behind him. Grant was standing at the door to a closet used for storing cleaning supplies. The light inside the cupboard was flashing on and off, making a tinkling note each time it winked on. Inside, Cerberus physician Reba DeFore was crouched on the floor, pulling her knees in close to her face. She was sobbing in silence, her shoulders shaking as she tried to stifle each cry.

  “Reba?” Kane asked. “DeFore, it’s me. It’s Kane.”

  The medic looked up, her brown eyes rimmed with red as she peered through the untidy mess of her blonde hair. DeFore had always taken special care with her hair, forming elaborate creations with the ash blonde tresses, different every day. Kane had never seen her like this.

  “Reba?” Kane said again, his voice gentle. “Come on, it’s okay. What happened here? What happened to you?”

  As he stepped forward, Kane felt the liquid under his heel, and realized that Reba DeFore was sitting in a pool of blood. She continued to shake as he approached her.

  “He’s here,” DeFore said, her voice breathless with fear. “I saw him.”

  Brigid was standing in the doorway, listening to their companion’s words. “He who?” she asked.

  “The stone man,” DeFore explained.

  Brigid could still remember the chilling sense of dread in DeFore’s tone, as if a part of her sanity had been stripped away.

  BACK IN THE CAVE, there was movement in the mirror. Brigid shifted in her seat, feeling her tension rise as she warily watched the huge stone figure appear from the shadows. It was Ullikummis, the glowing strands of lava glittering across his charcoal flesh.

  Brigid tried to turn, but couldn’t shift her head far enough, and was forced to watch the reflection of the great stone god striding toward her in the dim light. He stopped directly behind her, peering over her head at his own reflection in the mirror.

  “You see the mirror?” Ullikummis asked.

  Brigid studied the reflection of his craggy stone face looming out of the darkness above her own. He looked damaged, the stonework more ruined than she remembered, as if hit with buckshot, or a dead thing eaten by worms.

  “Yes.” She nodded, the word little more than a breath.

  She saw the stone colossus move his hands then, reaching behind her until she felt his hard, cool fingers pressing against the nape of her neck.

  “What are you doing?” she blurted, unable to keep the fear out of her voice.

  “Watch the mirror, Brigid,” Ullikummis replied, “for in it is contained your future.”

  Brigid felt something drag along the nape of her neck, bumping over the vertebrae there where it pressed against her skin. It felt like needles, or the feet of an insect playing along her spine.

  “Please,” she said, cursing herself for showing weakness in front of her enemy.

  Then she felt something jab at her skin, and she stifled a cry of pain. Something was pressing into her, pushing against the flesh at the back of her neck.

  “Please stop,” Brigid cried. “Please tell me what—”

  Ullikummis met her eyes in the mirror as he worked something at the top of her spine. “You have fought with the Annunaki for the longest time as apekin measure,” he stated, as Brigid felt the hidden thing burrowing into her flesh. “Have you never wondered what it is like to be one of us?”

  Brigid screamed as something clawed beneath her flesh, plucking at the ganglion of nerves that wrapped around her spine.

  “Are you aware of casements, Brigid?” Ullikummis asked.

  She couldn’t answer. Her mouth was frozen open in silent agony as the sharp thing, whatever it was, continued to pull at her beneath her skin.

  “Other worlds,” Ullikummis continued, “a theory of alternatives where futures may be played out differently.”

  Brigid had heard of the theory, had been privy to it on occasion, where a future with Kane as her lover had been foreseen. She tried to focus her mind on the words Ullikummis was saying in his gravelly tones, tried to reach past the pain as her body struggled against its ties.

  “I was taught by a wise Annunaki named Upelluri,” Ullikummis told her, his voice like the grinding of stone. “Upelluri once explained to me how the Annunaki differ from humans by explaining their simple-minded concept of the casements. He said that naive and short-sighted philosophers had misinterpreted them, treating the different vibrational frequencies as one would the rooms of a house. Instead, Upelluri had compared it to looking in a mirror.”

  Brigid rocked in place, wailing in pain as the thing burrowed through her spine, seeming to tear at her very being. “Please,” she howled. “Please stop.” Her breath was coming faster and faster, a runaway steam locomotive hurrying to disaster.

  Ullikummis reached forward with one hand, clasping her head by the crown, holding it rigidly in place as she tried to squirm, forcing her to look into the mirrored glass.

  “You see your reflection,” Ullikummis explained, “and behind it you see the reflection of the cavern beyond, and the cavern in the mirror appears to have depth. But in reality, the whole thing is but a picture on a flat, reflective surface, with no more depth than the surface of a blade of grass.”

  Brigid stared at her reflection, at the thing that loomed behind her, even as pain surged across her back like fire.

  “Close your eyes,” Ullikummis instructed.

  She tried to shake her head, to tell this nightmarish thing that walked like a man no.

  “Close your eyes,” Ullikummis repeated, “and the pain will pass.”

  Her breathing was coming so fast now, the steam engine jumping the tracks and hurtling off the cliff. The pain was oblique, an impossible thing to calculate, to comprehend. She closed her eyes, praying it wasn’t a trick, praying that Ullikummis was not toying with her as a cat toys with a mouse.

  “This world,” she heard Ullikummis intone, “this galaxy with all its depth and color and difference—this is but the image on the surface of the mirror to the Annunaki. That was how Upelluri explained your ways to me.”

  Brigid waited, eyes closed, feeling the thing rummaging beneath her spine, like a rapist’s hand tugging at the hair at the nape of her neck, plunging her down, down, down. She whined, a gasp coming through clenched teeth.

  “Don’t fight,” Ullikummis instructed placidly. “Relax, Brigid.”

  Brigid struggled to hold herself still as the burning continued, trying the whole while to pretend it wasn’t happening, that it wasn’t there.

  “You fought with my father,” Ullikummis said thoughtfully, after a long pause. “I saw this when I imbibed time in the Ontic Libr
ary. You fought with my father, and others of our race, of the Annunaki.”

  In her fixed position in the seat, Brigid squirmed as the pain shifted, reaching down her back like claws.

  “I saw there,” Ullikummis continued, “that you have exceptional knowledge for an apekin, a…” he stopped, as if trying to recall the word “…human. And yet you never questioned what it was you fought.”

  “Tried,” Brigid replied, the single word coming out as a gasp between her gnashing teeth.

  “They acted like you,” Ullikummis said. “My father and the other overlords were aliens to your world, yet they behaved like you, like actors on a stage, dressed in masks and rubber suits. Humans in everything but appearance,” he mused, adding as if in afterthought, “and perhaps stamina. Yet you never questioned this.”

  “They had technology,” Brigid began, her words strained. “They differed from—”

  “No, they did not,” he interrupted. “The Annunaki are beautiful beings, multifaceted, crossing dimensions you cannot begin to comprehend. Their wars are fought on many planes at once. The rules of their games intersect only tangentially with Earth and its holding pen of stars. What you have seen is only a sliver of what the battle was, and the Annunaki have shamed themselves in portraying it thus.”

  Brigid listened, wondering at what Ullikummis was telling her. She recalled travelling to the distant past via a memory trap, and seeing the Annunaki as their slaves, the Igigi, perceived them. They had been beautiful, just as Ullikummis was telling her, shining things that seemed so much more real than the world around them, colored beings amid a landscape of gray. But when she had faced Enlil, Marduk and the others in her role as a Cerberus rebel, they had been curiously ordinary. Yes, they were stronger, faster, supremely devious, but they were—what?—the thing that Ullikummis called them? Actors on a stage? People dressed in masks and rubber suits like some hokey performance designed for children? Had Brigid and her companions been taken in by a performance, a show designed to entertain the feeble-minded?

  As Brigid considered this thought, Ullikummis spoke once more in his gruff, throaty growl. “They started their current cycle as hybrids, half human, half advanced DNA. The human part clings, holding them back. If you saw the true battles between the gods, if you had witnessed the ways they fought across the planes millennia ago, you would never even recognize the creatures you fought as the Annunaki—you would think them a joke.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Brigid asked, baffled.

  In reply, Ullikummis gave a single, simple instruction. “Open your eyes, Brigid.”

  She did so, found herself staring into her own green eyes in the mirror as the agony in her back abated, faded to nothingness. The mirror was like a drawing, a picture that could be falsified, that owed no one the truth.

  Brigid let out a slow breath, felt her heart still pounding against her rib cage. The pain in the back of her neck was gone as if it had never been.

  “Do you understand now?” Ullikummis asked, his voice coming from above her head.

  Brigid nodded. “I’m beginning to,” she said.

  Chapter 8

  There was a deep vein of pain in Mariah Falk’s left leg, down at the back of her ankle. A couple months ago, she had been shot there, and now the coldness of the cell was getting into the old wound.

  Wincing, she opened her blue eyes and reached down, rubbing her leg to relieve the aching numbness.

  Falk was a slender woman in her midforties, with short brown hair streaked with gray. Though not conventionally attractive, she had an ingratiating smile that served to put others at their ease. A highly trained geologist, Mariah was one of the brain trust of experts who had been cryogenically frozen at the end of the twentieth century and now formed a significant part of the Cerberus staff.

  Right now, however, she found herself lying on the rocky floor of a cavern, where she had been brought by Ullikummis’s loyal troops. Mariah remembered being transported here, and for the past two days she had waited patiently as the hooded troops had brought her basic meals of watery gruel. The food tasted foul and she suspected there was barely enough nutrition to sustain a person, but what option did she have? She was trapped in a cell with a door that appeared only at her captors’ request, with no warmth, barely any light other than the faint disk in the wall that offered a dull orange glow like a sodium streetlamp.

  Ullikummis. He had brought this upon her. In a roundabout way, he had been the one to cause her to get shot in the leg a few months earlier, as well, for it had been during her indoctrination into his regime in Tenth City that Mariah had sustained the wound.

  But why her? She wasn’t like Brigid Baptiste or Domi. They were warriors, soldiers in the war against the Annunaki. But Mariah was just a geologist. She had no place being here, locked away in a cell, treated like something inhuman. Soldiers playing soldier games, that’s what this was.

  But then Mariah remembered the soldier game she had become embroiled in forty-eight hours earlier, the same way she had remembered it a hundred times before while lying on this cool, unforgiving rock floor.

  SHE HAD BEEN SITTING in the canteen waiting for Clem Bryant when it began. The Cerberus canteen was never a lonely place; there was always something going on, some group just coming off shift or wolfing down breakfast—be it six in the morning or six in the evening—prior to starting their shift.

  Mariah sat at one of the tables with its shiny, wipe-down plastic top, a book propped open in her hands, watching the world go by. Now and then she would spot someone she knew stride through the swinging doors and head over to the serving area, and they would wave or nod in acknowledgment before she went back to her book.

  Sometimes it was weird, Mariah reflected, living in the future. She was a freezie, a refugee from the Manitius moon base who had been woken two centuries after her own time and forced to adapt. Mariah was quite happy to chug along at her own pace, studying rocks and offering insights into the changes in soil structure that had been wrought by the nuclear war of 2001. Still, it was a strange thing to be living in the future. The book she was reading, for instance, was a relic of another age, for the mass production of literature for entertainment had somehow fallen by the wayside during Earth’s darkest days, and the barons who had risen to control America had frowned upon such frivolity. Perhaps, Mariah thought, they had been scared that people might use books to expose the truth, to encourage the free-thinking that the baronial system had almost managed to stamp out. The barons had turned out to be the chrysalis state for the Annunaki overlords—little wonder they were afraid of freethinking and the sharing of ideas. Things could be hidden in books, even in the most innocuous fiction.

  Mariah chuckled to herself. Perhaps not this particular fiction, she mused as she admired the cover painting of a handsome, broad-shouldered man in a doctor’s white coat consulting a chart with intensity, while the pretty nurse in the foreground bit her lip and looked concerned. It was a done deal that the two of them would get together just in time before the final page, to live happily ever after—the novel’s pink spine promised that, even if the book itself strived to add tension to the romance.

  Mariah looked up, eyeing the door that led into the kitchen area. Did she and Clem have a pink spine on their book? She hoped so. She had been getting closer to him over the past six months or so, spending more time in his company.

  Clem Bryant was a fascinating mixture of contradictions. On the one hand he was polite, well-spoken, sophisticated and urbane, able to verbally fence his way out of any situation. On the other, he had a spiritual side that seemed to be at odds with the image he presented to the outside world. The first time Mariah had realized this was when Clem had taken her on a trip—a date, really—to the steps down to the River Ganges, where he had explained to her about washing away one’s sins. Mariah had been taken aback by this, as Clem had always seemed so straight-laced. And yet it seemed to fit with his personality perfectly. He gave off the impression of havin
g an amazing sense of inner peace. A freezie just like Mariah, Clem was an oceanographer by trade, but had found his true vocation as a cook in the Cerberus kitchen.

  As Mariah watched idly, the staff door to the kitchen swung open and he came striding toward her, carrying a plate of something in his hand. In his late thirties, Clem was tall and slender, with dark hair swept back from an expanse of forehead, a carefully groomed goatee on his chin. Though he looked typically well-kempt, Clem’s white apron was speckled with cocoa powder. He greeted Mariah with a broad smile as he took the seat opposite hers.

  Mariah glanced down at the plate, which he’d placed between them, and saw it contained a little stack of brownies dusted with icing sugar. “Chocolate brownies, Clem?” she asked. “I’ve never seen these on the canteen menu.”

  Clem gazed at her, his intelligent blue eyes peering into hers. “Well, one has to shake up the menu now and then or become stale,” he said with a raised eyebrow. “But I require a guinea pig to test the first batch. Any suggestions?”

  Mariah held one hand above her head excitedly. “Ooh, pick me, pick me!” she trilled.

  He laughed, pushing the plate toward her. As he did so, the doors to the canteen crashed open and one of the Cerberus security detail—a woman called Sela Sinclair—came running into the large room.

  “We’re under attack,” she shouted, her eyes wide with fear.

  “What th—?” Mariah muttered. But before she or anyone else in the room could respond any further, the doors slammed open on their hinges and seven mysterious figures in hooded robes spread out into the room. The strangers launched small stones out of something held in their palms, and the stones seemed to race through the air, picking up speed as they hurtled toward their victims. Two struck a diner in the back before he could even react, and his head exploded as a third stone smashed through his skull.

  Sela Sinclair dropped and spun, raising the M-16 she held and blasting off a half dozen shots in quick succession. The weapon had an underbarrel grenade launcher, a little bulky, but designed for maximum damage. Sela herself was a wiry, lean-muscled, dark-skinned woman with a perpetually fierce expression. A noble warrior and efficient combatant, she was ex-USAF and had been part of the Cerberus Away Teams since their formation.