by James Axler
His name was Davies and he had once lived a refined life in the towering city of Beausoleil out in the western territory of the old United States of America. His life had been devoted to engineering—he had helped perfect one of the processes used to externally coat the walls of Beausoleil. Davies had been overseeing a project to find a more durable roofing design for some of the towers on Alpha Level when the air raid had struck, mercilessly destroying whole chunks of the ville that had stood for almost a century against all intrusion, a monument to man’s reborn desire for civilization under the auspices of the Program of Unification.
Davies had lost his home and his wife when the bombs struck, watched through the windows of his office as dark smoke poured from the residential building he had lived in. He had been lucky to survive; in the highly organized microcosm of society that was Beausoleil, Davies had done something almost unthinkable that morning—he had gone into work early, better to address the roofing issue that had concerned the buildings along the east walls of the ville. It had been that dedication to his duty that had allowed Davies to survive, while the very buildings he had planned to reroof had been destroyed in the blink of an eye as the bombing raid leveled whole chunks of the settlement.
In that day, Davies had lost his family, his home and his ville. Escaping the crumbling ville as smoke billowed from its ruins, Davies had found himself adrift. He had never ventured outside the ville’s protective walls, had never had cause to consider life as an outlander. For a while he wandered the vast territory that had belonged to Baroness Beausoleil, searching for food and shelter and a way to live. He had fallen in with a group of nomadic farmers who bred goats. They had taken him in, teaching him to be strong, to rear the disagreeable and pugnacious animals. He was damaged inside, his spirits at their lowest ebb, but Davies understood work and so he threw himself into this new task, rearing goats as the tribe moved from one location to the next. He often stopped to cock his head as he went about his business, imagining he heard his wife’s voice calling him to share some idle observation, only to discover it was just his imagination, a ghost on the wind.
Like so many of the ville dwellers who had lost their homes, Davies had been a man cast spiritually adrift. The new church had arrived at an ideal time, with its promise of utopia, of Heaven on Earth. Beausoleil was just one of several villes that had been left in ruins across the great continent of North America, and the outflow of survivors and refugees was colossal. Ullikummis could not have chosen a better time to begin his religion with its promise of a better tomorrow; a whole segment of the population had become desperate to hear that very message. Davies was one of them, and he had joined the congregation in its raggedy meeting room in a spit of a town on the outskirts of Beausoleil’s territory. He had recognized other people there from his years in the ville, though they looked thinner now, and many of the men had grown beards. Each day the congregation grew, and all that the minister demanded in return was the pledge to a better world. “Our love is stone,” he had said, “and a stone can never be destroyed.” The message had appealed to Davies more than most, for he had worked with stone in his ville life, knew its properties and limitations, appreciated the strength it represented.
Now Davies found himself at the forefront of a swiftly formed platoon of crusaders come to fight in the name of their god. He had not heard the call when it had come, but the minister had; the stone was embedded inside him and he could always hear the drums if he listened, while Davies, like many others in his congregation, remained a simple advocate, trusting the stone-blessed minister to instruct them in god’s will. Thus, when the call had come, Davies had stepped through the quantum gateway with willing fervor, joining the others in his congregation as they stepped forth to fight in the war of gods.
Armed with a simple strut of wood pulled from the wreckage of a woodworm-ridden door destined for scrap, Davies lunged for the first of the Annunaki—an eight-foot-tall figure who dwarfed his own five-foot-seven frame. The length of wood cut through the air, arcing toward the powerfully muscled torso of the Annunaki warrior. With dazzling speed, the Annunaki’s left arm jabbed out, swatting the hunk of wood aside before it could strike his naked purple-blue body. Davies had no time to react; already the Annunaki’s other arm was up, striking him across the jaw in an open-palmed slap. Davies tumbled backward, stars bursting across his vision with the force of the blow.
Behind him, Davies’s colleagues were rushing at the Annunaki trio, and one of them stepped on the dark-haired man’s fingers as he fell to the ground. The lead Annunaki, the one with a shimmer of purple-blue scales and a spiny crest running the length of his scalp, swatted at the next human, knocking the man so hard he went careening into a bone wall.
There was barely any room to maneuver in this alleylike pathway. Far from being helpless, the three Annunaki were like a battering ram, a solid wall that hurtled into the human soldiers without any hesitation, let alone mercy. They fought for their master, the god Enlil; to back away would be heresy.
Human bodies fell backward, tossed against walls and ground, one thrown so high he slapped into the edge of a second-story roof, snapping his spine as his fragile body folded with the impact. The Annunaki drove onward, smashing aside two or three humans at a time, each one as powerful as a whole squadron of men. Twenty-four men fell in as many seconds to just those three Annunaki, and their lizard brothers were exacting a similar toll as they charged to meet the intruders to Enlil’s majestic starcraft.
One of the humans, a brutal man called Thomersen who had a history of violence, ran at the Annunaki devils with a meat cleaver in his hand. Unlike the soft ville-raised people who had joined his congregation, Thomersen had been raised in the Outlands, and he knew how to take care of himself. When the call had come, he had picked up the first weapon he could find before entering the swirling portal that cut through space. He had used the meat cleaver the night before to carve up one of the goats his tribe raised for slaughter.
Thomersen’s cleaver swished through the air as he ran at an orange-scaled Annunaki. Unarmed, the Annunaki held one arm up protectively and shrieked as the razor-edged blade sliced a line across his forearm from wrist to elbow, a great gob of flesh falling away in bloody slop. Thomersen smiled sadistically, eyeing the foul alien, little comprehending that it was of the very same species as the stone god he stood for.
In a blur of sunset-orange scales, the Annunaki spun on a heel, bringing one powerful leg out in a sweep and knocking the grinning apekin away in a flail of limbs.
Thomersen crashed to the ground with a woof of expelled breath, cursing as the meat cleaver slipped from his sweaty hand. He reached for it automatically, only to feel something crash down on his back, knocking him jaw-first back to the ground. It was the Annunaki, running across his back as he reached for the vicious implement. The next thing Thomersen saw was that wicked blade flashing through the air toward him as the lizard-man plucked it from the ground, striking so swiftly that he almost didn’t feel it at all. Thomersen’s face began to burn a moment later as the nerves sang with pain, and the vision in his left eye turned red with blood. What happened after that was mercifully swift as the Annunaki finished the kill.
As Thomersen slumped to the ground, his hacked-up body twitching as his lifeblood spilled across the cobbled bones, the orange-scaled Annunaki turned, swiping at the next closest human with the cleaver he now wielded, lopping a great hunk of flesh from the woman’s hip. The woman cried out as the material of her pants was shredded, the bloody gouge cutting through to the bone. The Annunaki grabbed her by her outstretched arm as she tried to run, hefting her from her feet and driving the bloody wedge of the meat cleaver into her torso. The woman shrieked, while others of her number came hurrying over to help or struggled with the other Annunaki warriors. The meat cleaver swept down in the Annunaki’s clawed hand, driving into the woman’s skull thrice before he turned his attention to his next foe.
&n
bsp; This same bloody scene was played out again and again in various ways across the vastness of the city like the repeating chorus of some terrible death song, as the one hundred met three thousand. The skirmishes were tiny and brutal, taking place in alleyways and beneath grand hoardings that grew from the buildings like fingernails. On the outskirts of the dragon ship, the quantum gateway held in place, disgorging more and more warriors for Ullikummis, each man, woman and child armed with faith. The towering pillars of rock that Ullikummis had drawn from the earth helped guide them, directing them like a funnel into the battlefield. Ullikummis himself was somewhere amid the bone structures, striding purposefully into enemy territory with Brigid and the yet-born Ninlil at his side.
In some instances, the Annunaki found themselves facing those most loyal to Ullikummis, the so-called firewalkers who had submitted to the intrusive addition of the sentient stone into their bodies. These warriors were stronger, able to meditate and call upon the endurance of their master to better deflect blows, their flesh becoming like unto a thing of stone. They too fell, though they took many of the reborn Annunaki with them.
One group of firewalkers pinned an Annunaki with emerald-scaled skin within the tiny courtyard between low buildings, taking the higher ground and firing sharp stone flecks from the slingshots that they carried until the creature finally tumbled to his knees. Then they swarmed down upon their fallen foe, ripping into him with stony kicks and punches with all the force of an avalanche, pounding his body into pulp. The Annunaki lost consciousness at some point during the attack, but the crowd continued on, hating the others and all they represented.
Sela Stone was among the early waves of humans who rushed into the city to face the Annunaki, and the scene of carnage all around her reminded her of the horror she had witnessed at the Cerberus redoubt. There it had been Ullikummis’s troops who had attacked her people, yet now she fought for them, her old identity of Sela Sinclair like a dream she had awoken from. Highly trained in the ways of combat from her days in the U.S. Navy, Sela used a pistol to blast not the Annunaki, whose skins were superhard, but to detonate explosive charges she tossed at them. It was a lot like skeet shooting, tossing those charges and blasting them while they were still in the air. She watched as the charges detonated, pouring fire over the relentless Annunaki warriors as they hurried down another of the alleylike streets. Though imperfect, her plan managed to down four Annunaki, two of them with one hit. She continued using it to push the line forward, getting herself and the human troops farther into the starship city.
Davies, meanwhile, had to have blacked out, and he awoke lying on the ground, shaking his head to try to clear it as the screams and sounds of violence echoed from the unadorned walls all around him. The bulk of the battle had moved farther into the city, little pockets of skirmishes occurring at almost every turn. There was blood on his lip, and he could taste it—acrid like iron—swilling between his front teeth. He pulled himself up, peering around as the world swam dizzily back into view. There were humans lying all about him, their limbs crushed or hacked off, their bodies stretched out at awkward angles.
Davies pulled himself warily to his feet, searching for possible threats. He guessed that he had survived because he looked dead, in some ironic twist of fate that he could not really put into words. Screams and shouts echoed from somewhere nearby, and the sudden cry of “Hold the line!” went out over the low buildings from behind him, though he could not pinpoint it. Then, up ahead, Davies saw five of the Annunaki troopers stomping along the narrow passageway in his direction, their lizard faces set in mean scowls.
Davies searched for a weapon that might have been discarded by one of his colleagues. His own length of door frame had disappeared amid the carnage, but there was a knife lying by a line of steps, and he hurried to snap it up. Streaked with blood, the knife was long and wide, shaped like a machete. Davies looked back up the claustrophobic street as the Annunaki marched toward him. He was outnumbered, and the knife in his hand looked decidedly small when compared to the muscular, naked bodies of the Annunaki.
Davies turned as he heard a noise from behind him—more footsteps, these heavy, the sound of them dominating the audio landscape for a moment. It was Ullikummis, rounding the corner. Davies felt himself tremble. Oh, to be in the presence of his god, a figure he had never actually seen before. Ullikummis was huge, taller than Davies had imagined, and his dark, rocky body was cut through with lines of lava that glowed intensely. He was magnificent. Behind him came his peculiar entourage—the beautiful redhead and the little girl with the feathery white-blond hair.
Ullikummis strode forth, taking in the quintet of Annunaki in a single dismissive glance. His hand flicked forward with disarming casualness and the ground beneath them rumbled. As the Annunaki ran at this, their most hated enemy, the cobbled pathway was rent apart, broad spikes of rock tearing through the surface and snagging the two lead Annunaki before they could step aside. The sharp lines of rock pierced their bodies and, immolated, they squirmed on them as Ullikummis strode past, never once slowing his pace. He had killed Annunaki in his youth, piercing their bodies with the stone knife Godkiller, a blade rent from the very fabric of his flesh. He thought nothing of killing them now, despite the tenacity of their superior bodies against common assault.
Ullikummis was upon the others in the group in an instant, batting the first of them aside with a sweep of his mighty arm. The creature’s jaw cracked as he tumbled away, skull broken with the force of that blow.
Ullikummis lunged, his huge hand snatching for a face. The Annunaki ducked, driving a jabbing punch at the mighty rock lord’s body. The blow slammed against Ullikummis with a sound like a toppling redwood, but he held his ground, pushed just two inches back on the flat, circular bases of his feet.
Davies watched in awe, blessed to see his idol in battle. He could not possibly guess the many hidden layers of this battle between Annunaki, even the pale imitations that the Igigi puppets were.
Then Ullikummis swept out again with one of his mighty arms, and the Annunaki trooper was flung backward, crashing into a wall with a shattering of bone. The one with the broken jaw was struggling back to his feet. Davies was about to cry out in warning, but Ullikummis was ahead of him, flicking his arm out to slam the outstretched fingers of his hand into the creature’s windpipe, felling him instantly.
The last of the enemy charged at Ullikummis, and he flicked his arm out once again, the fiery glow in his eyes pulsing brighter for a single second. With a rumble of quaking earth, another line of stone prongs sprang from the ground, bursting through the lumpy bone cobbles that lined the street until they stood like the needles on a porcupine’s back, each one seven feet in height. Davies shrieked as one of those sharp pointers drilled through his leg and up into his intestines, ripping out again at his breastbone in a gout of blood, his rib cage cracking open at the pressure. The Annunaki would-be attacker who had challenged Ullikummis hung in the air, another stone spike rammed through his body and up into his skull. He swung at a wicked angle, his own gore and brains sprayed across the stone, as Ullikummis marched onward, leading the way farther into the city of the dragon. Brigid Haight followed, with Little Quav in tow.
Davies died, staring into the dead eyes of the Annunaki as he swung like a washed sheet in the breeze.
* * *
THE SOUNDS OF WAR were long since behind him. Kudo could feel the exhaustion pulling at his muscles,
weighing him down. He had taken most of the twelve miles to the parallax point at a jog, carrying Domi’s slack body over first one shoulder then the other, alternating to try to stave off muscle fatigue. Prior to that, he had spent a day and night on mission, first flying to the drop zone as part of Grant’s field team and battling with several waves of guardians before he could finally enter the dragon. While inside the spaceship Tiamat, he had sustained dreadful injuries to his face when an acid-laced charge had struck him.
And yet, despite all of that, Kudo continued on—he was a Tiger of Heaven, honoring his duty would always be of paramount import.
The parallax point lay within the ruins of an ancient temple that had stood close to the Euphrates for at least four thousand years. The temple was a sprawling, low single-story building with a basement beneath, constructed of sandy-colored rock that camouflaged it from casual view. From the air it seemed to form an almost perfect pentagonal shape covering fifty yards at its widest axis.
Up close the temple was pockmarked with bullet wounds, and the wall surfaces had been eroded by wind over the millennia since it had been built. Even so, it still looked impressive, one of the earliest signs of civilization on planet Earth.
Over the portable comm device he wore against his right ear, Kudo heard Donald Bry confirming that he was in the right place. “An agent will meet you momentarily,” Bry promised.
Kudo acknowledged Bry’s report before striding the final few paces to the nearest wall of the ancient building. It was perhaps a little unusual that Donald Bry chose not to say anything else, but Kudo was grateful for the man’s silence as he turned his concentration to the abandoned structure, searching for possible threats. He remained wary. Their enemies were all around, were they not? Parallax points were frequently hidden within special sites of religious interest, their uncanny power perhaps subconsciously influencing the humans around them. This temple was a typical location for one.
Hefting Domi over his left shoulder, Kudo paced between narrow walls, and his footsteps were appreciably silent despite the weight of the girl he carried. His eyes moved left and right as he searched for signs of habitation, listening to the desert winds scouring the walls. A figure moved up ahead, emerging from behind one of the sand-colored walls. Kudo felt relief when he recognized Brewster Philboyd.
“Mr. Kudo,” Brewster said, smiling broadly beneath his bespectacled brow, “I believe you ordered a ride home.”