by James Axler
“Kane?” Grant answered, incredulous. “That you?”
“Course it’s me,” Kane answered. “Look, I need some help—”
“Busy just now,” Grant said, cutting in before Kane could finish. “Me and Rosie are down in the back end of Tiamat—you remember her?”
“I’m inside, too,” Kane explained. “Well, kinda.”
“Hell, Kane,” Grant spit as he clambered up the angled walkway with workmanlike determination, “this isn’t a good time to hit me with surprises. This ship just got lanced by a shit-storm of rock spears, with us caught in the middle.”
“Which must mean I’m directly above you,” Kane reasoned. “I need you to make your way here ASAP. I’ll fill you in on the way.”
“You know Brigid’s here?” Grant said. “Somewhere, anyway. I think she’s behind us.”
“Negative on that,” Kane corrected. “I’ve seen her and she’s on the same level as I am.”
“Do you know Enlil was in here?” Grant asked.
“Yeah, and he’s getting seven bells kicked out of him by Ullikummis,” Kane answered, a clear note of satisfaction in his tone. “But this is bigger than either of them, buddy. I’m riding the lightning here and I can’t do it alone.
“Let me know when you can see them.”
“Shit,” Grant cursed as Kane cut the transmission.
Above him, Rosalia had made her way to the mouthlike orifice that led from the water room, and she was standing at the door waiting for Grant to join her.
“You going to be long, Magistrate?” Rosalia taunted. “Sounds like a fucking pajama party down there.”
“It’s Kane,” Grant explained as he pulled himself up the last ten feet by the strength of his arms alone as the catwalk swayed, unanchored.
Rosalia’s dark eyes widened with concern. “Kane?”
“He’s here and he needs our help,” Grant elaborated. “My guess is he’s up somewhere near the main birthing chamber. We just need to find him.”
Rosalia’s mouth formed a moue as she considered the problem. “What about zeroing in on his transponder?” she suggested after a moment.
“Negative,” Grant replied, pulling himself through the angled doorway to join the dark-haired woman. “From what Kane tells me, that ain’t going to work.
“I don’t know what he’s got himself into,” the ex-Mag continued, “but it sure as shooting ain’t anything either of us would imagine in our wildest ones. Whatever, he asked for backup so that’s what we’re going to give him. Change of priorities.”
Rosalia nodded in acknowledgment. “Fine, then let’s find him.”
Grant and Rosalia trotted down the corridor, searching for an alternative route higher into the grounded spaceship.
* * *
IN THE UNDERGROUND storehouse in Agartha, Balam watched tensely through the veil of the cube’s wall where Kane sat in the grip of the living chair. He had retrieved something from elsewhere in the store, but seeing Kane now made him regret leaving him alone. The man’s face was strained with tension, his teeth clenched beneath his drawn-back, white lips, his eyes tightly closed. Sweat poured over the ex-Mag’s brow, and his damp hair stuck to his forehead and neck where it trailed over his collar.
Against his better judgment, Balam reentered the cube container, striding over to Kane. The atmosphere within the cube was electric, the air pressure heavy now as the navigator’s chair powered up to maximum capacity, flinging Kane’s astral self into the void.
“Kane,” Balam warned, “you are pushing yourself too hard. You must retreat or you’ll be killed.”
His body straining against the bonds of the chair, Kane gave no indication of response.
Balam stepped closer, and he felt his robes clinging to him with the static electricity in the air. “Kane, can you hear me?”
Kane’s eyes scrunched tighter as he shook in his seat, and then his teeth parted just slightly and he spoke in a strained voice. “I hear ya, Balam,” he said. “But I have to do this. Baptiste is relying on me.”
“Brigid Baptiste may be lost,” Balam reminded Kane with stuffy officiousness. “And you will be, too, if you do not step back from this mad quest.”
“Back off, Balam,” Kane growled, the tendrils of the chair stretching over his cheeks and closed eyes. “I can do this. I can beat them at their own game.”
“No human could ever navigate tesseract space,” Balam said with the wisdom of the ages. He was ancient, the last of the Archons who had dwelled in secret on planet Earth for many centuries. While he admired Kane, Balam felt sure the human was being foolish. No son of the apes could possibly enter the
multidimensional space and maintain his sanity. Some things were simply not meant for humankind.
“I insist you remove yourself from the chair. Do so now, before you lose everything on this fool’s errand.”
Kane took a steadying breath, and as he did so the chair seemed to oscillate in time with him. “Balam, can you still see what I see? Are we still linked?”
Balam nodded his heavy, bulbous head. “We are.”
“Then I’m going to need your help,” Kane explained. “Tune into my frequency, or whatever it is you do with that freaky brain of yours. You’re going to be my navigator.”
“Kane, I can’t possibly...” Balam began.
“The stakes are too high for that shit,” Kane growled.
“What you’re suggesting,” Balam said, the tension clear in his usually calm voice, “is entering dimensional planes that humans have no equipment to even perceive. The dangers are too great—you will be overwhelmed in a matter of seconds and I cannot possibly give consent to that. It is suicide, plain and simple.”
“Do you know what they used to say about me back in Cobaltville, back when I was a Magistrate?” Kane asked.
“Is this a rhetorical question?” Balam replied in confusion.
“They used to send me up front on exploratory missions,” Kane continued. “They said I had a point-man sense, that I could sniff out danger before it happened. That point-man sense kept me alive, and it saved more than one of my colleagues.”
“Friend Kane, with my sincerest respect, the words you are speaking are idiocy,” Balam argued. “Whatever your abilities may be in our world, you will be
entering a separate plane of reality with no markers or even a frame of reference.”
“And that’s why you’re going to be my navigator,” Kane said. “Chair’s the engine—you’re the map reader.”
Kane clenched his teeth once again as another wave of hideous power emanated from the space navigation chair, firing through every cell of his body as it responded to his mental command. Kane was shaking violently in his seat, and Balam was forced to step back as a burst of static electricity zapped across the cube-space. The ex-Mag clenched the arms of the chair with such strength that his fingers dug into the armrests. Then Balam saw a lopsided smile cross Kane’s lips.
* * *
WITHIN HIS FRACTURING mindscape, Kane saw the different levels of space open up within the battle of the gods. The Annunaki were multidimensional, but it was only now that he began to truly see that. They were shapes and colors and smells he could not describe, things that clashed and morphed and changed. Behind them, the hexagonal chamber of Tiamat appeared as solid as it ever had, and Kane clung to it to retain his sense of space. The humanoid figures of Enlil and Ullikummis struck out at each other, their battle raging on the physical plane he knew.
“Lakesh,” Kane said, trusting his Commtact to carry the words, “I’m going to need you and Brewster covering my ass for the string-theory shit, okay?”
Close to Kane’s ear, Lakesh’s voice gave assent. “Okay, Kane, we’re with you in spirit.”
“Grant?” Kane said, trying a second time as Brewster patch
ed through the communication. “I want you up here ASAP. You and Rosie have got a couple of gods to execute. You read me?”
“I read you, man,” Grant grumbled, “but you’re asking a lot. We haven’t had much success offing the Annunaki before now. What makes you think things’ll work out different this time?”
“Because you have a man on the inside,” Kane said. “Literally. I’m going into their soulscape to finish this once and for all. But time’s ticking, and I’m going to have to start this party without you.”
“That’s cool,” Grant said. “We’ll be there as soon as.”
Kane’s final instruction was merely voiced, engendering the disconcerting feeling of speaking to someone in the same room as he was and yet thousands of miles away. “Balam?” Kane asked. “You have your eyes on, my friend?”
Kane could hear Balam take a steadying breath, even over the sounds of conflict in the hexagonal chamber.
“I will do my best, Kane,” Balam assured him. “But I apologize if—”
“Save the apologies for my funeral,” Kane told him.
For a moment, the twin figures before him raged and fought, Enlil swinging his son’s rock body by one arm before being tossed aside by a flick of his mighty son’s wrist.
“Okay, people,” Kane said, steely determination in his voice. “We’re doing this together. On three.”
With that, Kane’s astral form charged forward beneath the towering arches of the room inside the belly of Tiamat, lunging forward as the Annunaki batted at each other with all their might.
“One...”
As he—ran? floated? swam?—Kane looked past the battling figures, relaxing his eyes and seeing the sparkling lights once more, swirling around one another as they, too, clashed in the folds of enhanced space.
“Two...”
And in that moment Kane dived into the midst of them, allowing his form to be pulled and reshaped as it entered another plane of existence.
It was a moment that belonged in the history books.
“Three!”
It was the splitting of a man’s soul.
Chapter 15
Big things and little things, all of them vying for space, like a whirling mosaic that Kane could just barely make sense of, and only then if he looked at it from the corner of his eye.
The universe expanded before his eyes, a dark blanket dotted with stars. And the two figures danced on the universe, their movements as practiced as an ancient ballet, each one taking his role.
Which was Ullikummis?
Which was Enlil?
Kane could no longer tell. Now they were just two dancers whirling through the cosmic winds, playing each other at the great game of the gods.
For a moment, Kane stopped, holding his hands out before him. The limbs were transparent now, ephemeral things with no consistency. As he looked at the fingers of his right hand, seeing the stars shining through each one, they began to grow, elongating and expanding until they were no longer fingers at all, just a blot on his vision like a sty.
“Hold yourself together, friend Kane,” Balam instructed, seeing all that Kane saw via the psychic link they shared.
“C-c-can’t,” Kane said, struggling with the word.
“You are seeing the universe from another angle,” Balam told him reasonably, “but you must stay focused or the enormity of it all will overwhelm you.”
Kane bit down hard, feeling the sensation of his teeth crashing together in his mouth, bringing himself back from the brink of madness. The multiple images of time and space whirled before his eyes, static and ever-
changing, a continual contradiction.
Enlil took on a shape Kane recognized, though he appeared more like a Chinese dragon now, a serpentine line of red-gold scales capped with his sneering face. He lacked substance as Kane understood it, dancing through the universe like a constellation.
Kane turned—his head? his body?—and saw the rock figure of Ullikummis hurtling across the skies like a meteor shower, treading across the blanket dotted with stars before bombarding his father with the multiassault of his component parts, each rock bearing the Annunaki prince’s face.
Kane turned once more as the two figures whipped past him, seeing the sun properly for the first time.
“Hold focus,” Balam instructed, his voice a steady presence at the edge Kane’s consciousness.
Kane watched the sun, saw the dancing flames licking across its surface, reaching out to space only to scuttle back at the very last second, never daring to overextend their reach, like waves on the shore.
And then he was on Earth again, but no longer inside Tiamat. It was a ville now, perhaps Cobaltville, where he had grown up, or maybe one of the eight others, all of them strictly following the same design. People were running toward Kane, screaming in fear.
“Molecules,” Balam said.
“What?” Kane demanded.
“They are molecules, the debris of the battle,” Balam explained. “Your mind is finding a way to interpret what it is experiencing. These are sights no human has ever witnessed.”
Kane watched the screaming mob come running toward him, charging about and past him, knocking into him as he held his place, a rock in the human tide. They were running from something, he reasoned, and so he stepped forward, making his way through the crowd of faces as they surged by.
There, behind them, was the thing that everyone feared. Two great gods striding the skies, their arms gripped together, two hundred feet above Kane’s head. Their legs stood like impossible skyscrapers, reaching past the walled limits of the ville, lancing up to dizzying heights. Their faces were lost in clouds. But Kane recognized them as Enlil and Ullikummis, battling at whatever level this was.
They were gods, Kane felt now. They battled as gods, running across space, reaching into the very building blocks of the universe with the urgency of their fury.
“Don’t let yourself become overwhelmed,” Balam reminded. “Interpret and act, that’s all you can do now.”
Lightning danced across the clouds—
Krak-a-boom!
Krak-a-boom!
Krak-a-boom!
Each snap darted between the two colossal figures like the reaching fingers of a lover.
Kane searched around him as the crowd surged by, looking for some way to be a part of this war of the gods, some way to be more than an insect in the presence of the almighty.
* * *
OUTSIDE TIAMAT’S walls, the armies clashed, a thousand voices raised in hate. Numerous figures battled on the streets of bone, lone Annunaki facing down a dozen human beings, rending them to pulp with their brutal, relentless attacks. Pockets of humans succeeded in toppling one or two of their enemy through use of the stone weaponry with which Ullikummis had armed them.
Sela Stone watched from a doorlike recess of a wide column structure. The column twisted upon itself, around and around like an antelope’s horn. Bloodshed was all around, the white bone walls and cobbles of the streets awash with red. In her hand, Sela held the Colt Mark IV, its familiar weight providing scant reassurance. She had seen through the veil that Ullikummis had weaved before her and before the eyes of his faithful followers. Though she could not know it, the obedience stone that had been planted inside her months before had become dislodged when she had taken a savage side blow from one of the Annunaki soldiers. Her hair was matted with blood, thick, sticky, semidried gouts of it mixing with her short hair.
With the loss of the stone’s grip had come revelation, ironic as it was. The drumbeat, that brutal charging drumbeat, had disappeared from her thoughts where, for the past six weeks, it had raced in her head with all the power of thunder, impossible to ignore. Without its incessant noise, she was beginning to regain her composure, remember what it was to be Sela Sinclair and no
t Sela Stone, no longer just another “stone wife” in Ullikummis’s cheerless army. But still there were plenty of faithful to take up arms in the battle for control of Tiamat. All of them fought as if their lives depended on it, and the evidence was all around that in many cases it did—here were the dead bodies of her fallen colleagues, sprawled in street after street, in some places three or four deep.
And what were they fighting for? A promise? Was that all it took? Was that all any war took, ultimately?
Sela turned as a howling Annunaki dashed along the street, a narrow bone club hoisted in one of its gray-scaled hands. The club looked to have been fashioned from a leg bone, gouts of flesh still clinging to it near the grip. As he ran by, the Annunaki turned his head warily to check his surroundings, spotting Sela hiding in the shadows. His eyes narrowed and he halted in midstep, turning to face her, the club raised in one clawed hand.
Standing in the doorway, Sela willed him to move on, to leave her. She was still ordering her thoughts, still trying to remember what it was to be without the merciless drumbeat. “Go,” she whispered. She wanted no part of this war now, not until she properly comprehended what it was she was truly fighting for.
The gray-skinned Annunaki took no notice of her whispered instruction. Instead, he drew the club back and charged at Sela, reaching her in two long steps and swinging the simple weapon at her head. Sela ducked, her old U.S. Navy training kicking in automatically despite the lethargy that gripped her mind. The club cut the air, smashing against the back wall with the awful clanking sound of bone on bone.
Without raising her head, Sela’s right hand snapped out—the one with the pistol in it—and she slammed the nose of the Colt Mark IV against the kneecap of the Annunaki, squeezing the trigger as it struck. The pistol kicked in her hand, and the Annunaki listed to one side as the cartilage of his knee was shattered. The Annunaki were tough, their scaled skin acting like proxy-armor, but at point-blank range even they could not shrug off a bullet, not one so deftly placed.