by James Axler
The whole lodge was beginning to stink of smoke as the fire spread from the eastern wing, wisps of gray billowing into the rooms.
Nearby, Bry was screeching, “I can’t make the shot. I can’t make the shot.”
The warrior for Ullikummis whirled in place, hefting Lakesh’s form this way and that as if to shake the very life from him. Lakesh watched the room spin about him, groaning as his arms and legs knocked against the walls and windows. In the background, he could hear Donald Bry chanting those words over and over: “I can’t make the shot. I can’t make the shot.”
Suddenly they were at the glass doors that led to the sunken garden at the rear of the property, and Lakesh yelped as he was thrown against them, crashing into the glass with a crack. The glass held as he struck it with shoulders and back. A cobweb of fault lines appeared on its surface and widened as the Cerberus director fell to the floor, losing his grip on the Smith & Wesson as he did. The gun skittered away, retreating beneath a low table containing paper files and computer equipment.
Lakesh lost consciousness for just a few seconds, a great dark wash crashing across his vision like waves on a moonlit beach. When he opened his eyes again, the sounds around him eerily distant, he saw his hooded attacker had turned his attentions to Donald Bry, backhanding the man with a slap so hard that it knocked Bry off his feet.
Lakesh lay slumped on the floor with his head resting against one large glass panel of the French doors. His vision was swimming as the thuggish firewalker strode across the room toward him once more, a streak of red blood marring the left side of his face where Lakesh had shot him. Lakesh struggled to make sense of things as his brutish attacker uncoiled something that he had produced from a pocket of the robes. It was a length of leather, a simple slingshot curled around itself. With his other hand, the robed man tugged at a pouch hanging at his hip, pulling out a clutch of three sharp stones.
Lakesh urged his body to move, trying frantically to get out of the path of that vicious attacker who loaded the slingshot and took aim at his face. His body did not want to respond. It ached and seemed ungainly now, twinges of pain lancing through his arms and legs. Even his mouth didn’t want to work anymore, and when he tried to plead for his life it came out as a gurgle from the back of his throat, the sound of a man choking on food too rich for his sensitive palate.
“Faithless nonbeliever,” the robed man growled as he drew back the loaded slingshot. “You are now erased from history.”
Chapter 10
Lakesh was helpless. Before him, the robed man drew his slingshot back to its fullest extent and began to launch the stone ammunition. But as he did so, all hell broke loose. The window glass behind Lakesh’s head shattered with a loud crash and he sank back. Before him, the man with the slingshot toppled backward as a gout of blood burst from his right eye, his own shot pounding into the ceiling as his aim was ruined.
Lakesh lay supine, his neck propped on the wooden frame of the French door and facing out into the garden beyond as shards of glass tumbled to the ground all around him. He screwed his eyes tightly shut as glass splinters peppered his face and chest, feeling like a rain shower as they struck him.
Across the room, the firewalker crashed into the table behind him, a bloody mess where his eye had been. The slingshot hung limply in his hand, its ammunition strewed across the floor beneath the table.
A familiar voice spoke as Lakesh lay there, his eyes clenched shut to stave off the debris. “Hi, honey,” Domi said. “Miss me?”
Tentatively, Lakesh opened his eyes as the last of the broken glass tinkled around him, barely believing what he had heard. Standing there, upside down in his vision where his head was stretched back across the ridge of the door’s frame, was Domi. The silver length of her Combat Master was poised at the end of two straight, pure white arms, her sleeveless black top and combat pants in stark contrast to her skin.
“D-Domi...?” Lakesh murmured, the word struggling to break free of his burning throat.
“Tip for you, lover mine,” Domi said as she bent to check over Lakesh, her longtime work colleague and current romantic partner. “When facing a firewalker, you need to shoot them in the eyes. They can’t ‘stone up’ there.”
Lakesh breathed a sigh of relief, choked and coughed as he tried to push himself up from the floor. Behind Domi, two other familiar figures were making their way into the lodge, stepping over Lakesh’s form as they made their way inside. Lakesh recognized Brewster Philboyd and Kudo, the Tigers of Heaven warrior who had gone on the mission with Grant’s field team.
“Did everything go all right?” Lakesh asked, his hand reaching for the cuff of Philboyd’s pants as he passed.
“The lodge is on fire,” Brewster replied. “We need to evacuate right now.”
Lakesh closed his eyes in a slow, weary blink. “Donald is around here somewhere,” he explained. “You need to—”
“I see him,” Brewster said, scampering over to where Bry had been left by the now-dead intruder’s attack. “He’s breathing. Should be okay.”
All around the lodge, the Tigers of Heaven were pushing back and defeating the intruders in a series of small skirmishes. Shizuka lost three men—highly trained warriors all—during the battle, but ultimately her side was victorious. Though how long that victory would last no one cared to wager. The lodge itself was smoke damaged, but for now Cerberus had nowhere left to go. So everyone settled in the ops room—including the double-agent Edwards, who was kept sedated—cordoning off whole sections of the dwelling.
* * *
A HALF-DOZEN ANNUNAKI soldiers were battling with a cluster of humans in a courtyard where six arteries met, overwhelming them with brisk strikes from their powerful bodies or utilizing ASP emitters to blast away their enemies. One of the group turned when he heard the sound of heavy footsteps, and he spied Ullikummis striding along one of the streets that led past the courtyard, the redhead and the child in tow. Seeing an opportunity for glory, the Igigu-turned-Annunaki cast aside the human he had been strangling and called to his colleagues, speaking in an ancient Sumerian tongue. The human was thrown high in the air, landing headfirst against a solid wall of the courtyard, snapping his neck and killing him instantly. The Annunaki paid it no mind.
His colleagues did likewise, casting aside their prey in an instant like cats toying with mice, turning the snakelike ASP emitter blasters on the humans and melting them in their punishing heat rays. As one, the Igigi-turned-Annunaki rushed out of the courtyard, running parallel to where their leader had spied Ullikummis.
As the great stone giant turned a corner, the six Annunaki were waiting, and they piled on him, leaping from the low roofs and diving out of the shadows, knocking the powerful figure to the ground by merit of their numbers. Ullikummis grunted as he struck the cobbles with hands and knees, and he shifted his head back in a whip-snap gesture that drove the back of his head into the nose of the Annunaki astride him. Struck, the Annunaki—copper-hued with the tint of emerald to his scales like copper piping left too long in seawater—fell back, collapsing as his mouth erupted in a cascade of blood. He writhed on the ground for a moment, spitting loose teeth from his ruined jaw, striking with a staccato of beats as they rebounded from the hard bone cobbles.
Walking a few paces behind her master, Brigid Haight held her hand up to halt the girl-child Quav, adopting a protective stance. The copper Annunaki spotted them as he wiped blood from his chin, and he reared up off the ground and leaped at them like a pouncing tiger.
As the other Annunaki used their weight of numbers to hold down and beat on Ullikummis, Brigid found herself facing their final member. She ducked, avoiding that opening leap with just inches to spare, feeling the powerful creature brush past. Her hand was at her holster instantly, pulling free the TP-9 automatic pistol, its sleek black lines creating a completed square shape around her forearm.
The copper-toned Annunaki was behind Brigid by then, using powerful legs to skitter across the back wall of the narrow pathway before turning back to face her. Right arm outstretched, Brigid blasted the reptilian figure with a stream of 9 mm titanium-shelled bullets, their casings tinkering on the ground as they spit from the muzzle of the weapon.
In an eye blink, the fast-moving Annunaki weaved out of the path of those bullets, snarling as just one of them clipped the ridge above his shoulder blade while he rocketed toward Brigid once more. She didn’t matter, she knew—what mattered was the child.
Brigid bent her knees in ingrained response, dropping as the Annunaki reached her. Unarmed, the Annunaki kicked one powerful leg at her face, missing it as she dropped beneath the sweep of his foot.
In that brief instant while the creature was balanced on one foot, Brigid brought her weapon to bear, blasting a cough of bullets at his leg and shattering the kneecap in an explosion of blood. The Annunaki unleashed a senseless howl, crashing to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Brigid was on him instantly, leaping onto his fallen form and driving the nose of her TP-9 into his open mouth before pulling the trigger once more. The Annunaki’s head was hacked up as bullets ripped through his flesh, great gouts of blood and offal painting the white cobblestones a vibrant red. Brigid watched the redness spurt across the street, blood licking up the walls as she held down the trigger.
At Brigid’s back, Ullikummis was struggling under the fearsome attack of five of his adversaries. They had overwhelmed him by their sheer numbers, and Ullikummis was unable to shake them from him long enough to best them. Trapped beneath their weight, Ullikummis ceased struggling and calmed his mind, searching for his opportunity to escape. With all those bodies upon him, it was like being held in darkness, the heat of them stifling him and snatching at his thoughts. Ullikummis cared nothing for heat or cold, his body genetically tempered so that it need suffer the assaults of neither.
Ignoring the scrum above him, the blows and kicks as the Annunaki strove to bloody him despite his impenetrable flesh, Ullikummis focused his mind on the ground below, the places hidden beneath the cobblestones of bone. There was rock there, he knew, and he reached for it with his mind, passing through the thin barrier to snatch at it with his powerful thoughts. He possessed a form of telekinesis, sufficient to command and manipulate rock in all its forms, an ability he had employed to build his great stone fortress Bensalem.
In his mind’s eye, Ullikummis saw the rock stir, and the ground beneath the dog pile began to tremble.
At that moment, a space appeared before Ullikummis’s face, and he looked up to see that the Annunaki huddle had parted just slightly, just enough to allow one of their number to turn his ASP emitter on the great stone scion of Enlil. Shaped like a viper’s head, the golden weapon curled around its user’s wrist, blasting a vicious beam of heat on the user’s command, which came with just a twitch of the muscles. Ullikummis stared into that viperlike face, his magma eyes glowing brightly as he concentrated on the rocks below him.
With a screech, the ASP emitter fired, its persimmon heat beam burning across Ullikummis’s stone face for less than a second before a two-inch-wide rock splinter burst from the ground and lanced straight through the user’s hand. Still blasting where the sliced-off hand grasped it, the ASP emitter dropped to the ground, sending its red-orange beam into the legs of two of the Annunaki in the dog pile and blasting a third in the ankle. All three lurched back, their weight shifting as they cried out in agony. Ullikummis seemed simply to shrug, shifting his mighty frame enough to free himself from the struggling Annunaki before rising to his full height once more.
Standing, Ullikummis towered over the other Annunaki by a foot or more, and his face billowed with black smoke where the heat beam had struck him. One of them—the one who had held the ASP emitter before losing it and his hand to the rock spear—lay curled up on the ground, clutching the stump of his arm to his chest. Ullikummis took a step forward, stamping down on the pathetic creature’s head until he heard a loud crunch of breaking skull.
Another Annunaki was still clinging to his back, and Ullikummis reached behind him, plucking the creature off with no more effort than a man pulling off a sweater. The Annunaki was a female with gray-blue scales the color of rain clouds, a ridge of spines running in twin lines over her scalp. Ullikummis slammed her on the ground, driving the breath out of her with the force of the impact.
As Ullikummis dealt with the gray-blue female, the others were struggling to retreat, their wounds showing in great gashes across legs and feet where the heat ray had struck them before blessedly winking out. Brigid found herself in the path of one of them—much to the lizardlike creature’s surprise—and she turned her reloaded TP-9 automatic pistol to blast a burst of fire into his forehead from near point-blank range. The Annunaki crashed backward, slamming into one of his colleagues as half his face disappeared.
The next Annunaki had scales as yellow as the sun. Despite a blistering gash along his left hip, the warrior ran at Brigid, identifying her as an enemy in a heartbeat. With exceptional timing, Brigid kicked off from the ground, leaping high in the air as the pale-scaled Annunaki charged her. Her feet struck the creature high in the chest, and she seemed to run up his body as he fell, whipping the TP-9 around and unleashing a storm of bullets into his torso as she leaped aside. The Annunaki shuddered with the impacts, crashing to his knees and sliding over the cobbles as his momentum dragged him on.
Brigid rolled as she landed, pulling herself into an open crouch as she held her weapon on her fallen foe. The Annunaki’s chest was pocked with blood where the bullets had struck, but he gritted his teeth in a savage snarl as he turned to face her.
Brigid sprang toward the yellow-skinned figure, leaping astride him before he could get back to his feet. Her pelvis slammed against the back of the Annunaki’s skull, one knee to either side of his head, and she squeezed. The Annunaki tried to shake her off as Brigid’s grip tightened, throwing his head left and right like some deranged headbanger from another era. Brigid clawed at the Annunaki with her left hand, scratching at his face until she found the eye socket.
The Annunaki warrior batted at her hand, trying to remove it from his face. Brigid snapped off another burst of fire from her pistol, the bullets cutting into the Annunaki’s reaching arm and snapping against the hard flesh of its scales. Then her fingers were in his eye, plunging beneath the lower rim of the eyeball and scraping upward.
The Annunaki hissed in pain—a sound like an angered snake—as Brigid jostled his yellow eye from the socket in a spurt of viscous liquid.
She dropped back, somersaulting in midair and landing on the ground before the yellow-scaled Annunaki, rocking back on her booted heels. The Annunaki warrior was grasping for his wounded left eye, and when he moved his hand aside the eye stared at Brigid angrily, its luscious egg-yellow turned red with blood, a circle of tears glistening all around it. Brigid pulled the TP-9 up again, rattling off another burst of fire as the Annunaki warrior charged toward her, his lips pulled back in furious determination.
As the Annunaki reached her, Brigid lashed out with her legs, delivering a vicious double kick to his chest and flipping him to the ground. She was on the creature in an instant, delivering a brutal punch to his face with such force that the warrior’s head snapped back with a horrible crack. As Brigid retreated from the fallen form, the canary-yellow warrior shuddered in place, struggling to get up again. His struggles looked like those of an insect rolled onto its back and unable to right itself. Brigid’s final blow had done something terrible to his spinal column, paralyzing the alien figure from the neck down.
Brigid turned, her red hair like a cloud of fire about her dirt-smeared face. Quav waited, cowering in the shadows of one of the chalk-colored buildings as the scuffle continued. Several of the wounded Annunaki had stopped before her, the wounds from the heat ray glistering on their legs, insects
already buzzing about them to feed. They looked at the hybrid child with a mixture of wonder and admiration, as if seeing something beautiful and otherworldly—an angel, a goddess. As Ullikummis crushed the fragile form of the gray-blue female warrior, Brigid delivered two blasts from her T-9 into the back of the heads of the waiting Annunaki, killing them before they even knew what was happening.
The girl Quav was not a goddess yet.
* * *
GRANT AND ROSALIA HURRIED up the sloping door hatch of the great ship Tiamat, their weapons in hand. Within, more than a dozen of the reborn Annunaki were guarding the entryway from intruders. In short, it was exactly the situation Grant had hoped to avoid. Crouching, he stopped at the lip of the door where it met the inside deck plating, gesturing for Rosalia to halt, too.
Crouched low, Grant peered at the interior, trying to make sense of what was going on inside. Naked, the Annunaki seemed to be working on the interior walls of the ship. A series of great explosions had rocked the insides of the living ship just a few hours before, and it appeared that these Annunaki were endeavoring to repair some of the damage to the walls. Great flaps of skin had broken away from those walls, hard chunks like metal plating, their surfaces patterned with whirls. Like much of the Annunaki technology, Tiamat was organic, grown to their specifications and existing in some nebulous, semiliving state. As such, she was capable of self-repair to a degree, though the Annunaki troopers were working hard to encourage that process. Here and there, the working Annunaki had piled up new plates for usage and were utilizing trolleys to ferry repair materials where they were needed. It looked like a combination of an engineering task and open-heart surgery.
At the back of the room, almost eighty yards from where Grant and Rosalia were poised, a rectangular doorway stood open, pale greenish light emanating from its mouth. There were a few other doorways to the sides of the room, Grant noted, some of them closed but their glowing locks visible amid the charred bone colors of the walls. Large rents were visible on the walls and ceiling, each one rippled and colored the pinkish-red of rare steak.