by James Axler
“If they rewrote the heroes’ rules, who would you root for?” Brigid asked.
“I don’t know,” Rosalia admitted. “I never cared much about the rules.” With that she drove her fist into Brigid’s face again, striking her across her smirking mouth.
Brigid’s body seemed to lose its strength, and Rosalia felt the woman go limp beneath her. The skin of Rosalia’s knuckles was scraped, her hand spattered with the other woman’s blood. Slowly, warily, Rosalia lifted herself from her opponent’s fallen body and looked up to the stone egg that waited amid the bubbling pool behind her.
As Rosalia pushed herself up, Brigid suddenly moved once again, springing from the deck and powering herself headfirst into Rosalia’s gut. She had been playing possum, the oldest trick in the book.
Rosalia crashed backward as the woman’s head struck her midriff, pushing her back in a flurry of skipping feet. Then suddenly there was nothing else for her to run against; the deck dropped away and instead Rosalia found herself splashing into the pit that dominated the room, with the lithe figure of Brigid Haight crashing down on top of her.
In an instant, both women sank beneath the pearly white surface of the viscous goo.
The chamber known as Tiamat’s ante-nursery fell into an eerie silence as the sounds of violence faded into instant memory. For a moment, the room was uncannily quiet. Even the bubbling pool of liquid seemed to hold still for those tense few seconds.
Then a figure emerged from the pool, clambering out of the iridescent liquid and reaching for the edge of the pit. The woman grabbed the side, pulling herself up and out of the nutrient bath in a swift movement before sweeping the gunk from her face. It was Rosalia, the band that held her ponytail lost somewhere beneath the liquid. She stood there, bent over, taking deep breaths as she ran her hands through her sopping wet hair and wondered, Where is Brigid?
The answer came a moment later, as a second figure burst from the pool, arms striving for the edge as she dragged herself out of the gunk.
“Here we go again,” Rosalia muttered.
But she couldn’t have been more wrong.
* * *
GRANT OPENED HIS EYES, struggling to recall what had happened. There were sounds coming from a source he couldn’t pinpoint, a rushing of machinery that simply pervaded the air, like the sound of one thousand kettles reaching boiling point in unison. Grant lay on his side amid a pile of debris, hunks of chipped bone scattered all about like detritus from a crematorium. Orange-red light seeped gloomily into his eyes, and for a moment Grant mistook it for blood, raising his hand to his face to try to brush it away. His arm ached and the hand tensed, muscles locking painfully as he brought it up to his face.
“What happened to me?” he muttered, his body sore and numb.
There were figures moving about, waddling away from him as he watched, their bodies enshrouded in dark rags. Grant watched them, trying to recall how he had wound up here.
He had been in the hexagonal room with the bone arches, he remembered, piecing it together slowly. The floor had given way and he had fallen, fallen a long way. Now he lay sprawled in whatever lay beneath—the engine room, somewhere close to the cooling water tanks.
Tentatively Grant pulled himself to a sitting position, his head reeling. He glanced up, spying the hole far above through which he—along with half the room, it seemed—had come crashing. It was a long way up, fifty feet or more, and it made Grant feel dizzy just looking at it. He had fallen all that way, but he remained alive. The incredible weave of the shadow suit had taken some of the impact, he guessed, along with the thick material of his Kevlar coat, bulletproof and apparently sturdy enough to cushion his fall. The rest he had taken himself, and he could feel his whole right side creaking as he moved, bruises doubtless forming.
He was resting atop a structure high above the floor, Grant realized, and this, too, had to have helped to break his fall, stopping him before he had plummeted the full distance between ceiling and floor. It looked like a huge tube, finished in dark metal with a foot-deep dent where his body had struck it with considerable force. There were similar structures all around, arrayed in rows that ran the length of the vast chamber. The room itself was of dimensions impossible to take in with the naked eye, stretching into darkness at one side, the width alone the size of two football fields laid end to end. It was the engine room, Grant recalled as he looked it over, where the dragon ship’s great stardrive was located.
Grant pushed himself up, inching along on his rump to the edge of the cylindrical unit he had landed on and peeking over the side. The floor was a good fifteen feet below, narrow walkways running between the vast tubes where debris from above had come crashing down in a violent hail. Down below Grant saw figures hurrying about as they endeavored to clear away the mess. They were the strange verminlike engineers, dressed in their rag cloaks and wearing the weird lighting units that emanated from their eyes on spectacle-styled rigs.
Grant looked at that drop to the floor, wondering whether he was up for another fall. His muscles ached and it was all he could do to stop from falling.
“Just give me a minute,” he told himself.
From behind him, Grant heard a booming sound over the rumble of machinery and turned in time to see Ullikummis leap onto the pipe he was sitting on from its neighbor seven feet away. The stone-clad giant ran across the cylindrical pipe toward Grant, anger in his molten lava eyes.
“Oh, shit!” Grant snarled as Ullikummis stomped closer.
* * *
THE WORLD COALESCED before Kane’s eyes, a wash of purples and mauves whirring through the sky. Color had returned, the clouds above dancing like spinning crystals, snowflakes of color in the air. There was a beach below, a beach with no sea, just a never-ending shore that echoed with the ghost of crashing waves.
Kane clambered down the tree, sensing somehow that he should get back to solid ground. As he did so, he saw the man-shape waiting a short distance away, cast in silhouette by the hidden eye of the sun, edges burning away layer by impossible layer.
“Kane, what are you doing?” Balam called from that distant place that was just next to his ear. “Are you lost?”
“I’m not lost,” Kane said, dismissing Balam’s concerns. “Where’s Grant?”
Lakesh’s voice piped back from the Commtact in Kane’s head after a moment, as he checked Grant’s transponder feed. “He’s still aboard Tiamat,” Lakesh confirmed. “Heart rate elevated. What do you intend to do?”
“You called it string theory,” Kane replied. “Layer upon layer of dimensions all intersecting, all a part of the whole we never see.”
“Yes, but...”
“I’m going to go kill me a god, Lakesh,” Kane stated. “I’m going to cut a gash through every one of those dimensions and kill me an Annunaki space god.”
At the base of the tree, Ullikummis waited like a statue, his flesh searing away over and over as he stood upon the shifting vermilion sands.
* * *
IN THE ENGINE ROOM, Grant sailed through the air as Ullikummis struck him a savage blow from one of his pile driver fists before he could even get himself to a standing position atop the cylindrical driveshaft. Head reeling, Grant looked up to see Ullikummis charging at him, magma veins glowing across his hideous rock form, drawing one of his mighty legs back to punt his foe.
Grant rolled, dodging the kick by a fraction of an inch, rolling again as Ullikummis stamped down at him as if to crush a bug.
“Die, apekin,” Ullikummis spit, puffs of smoke leaping from his wounded face as he spoke.
Adrenaline pumping, Grant forced himself to his feet, the Sin Eater materializing in his hand. The pistol kicked in Grant’s steady grip, spitting a trio of shots at Ullikummis from just a few feet away. Ullikummis dismissed the bullets, sweeping one of his massive arms through the air and knocking Grant
and the weapon aside.
The Sin Eater barrel bent while Grant was thrown backward under the incredible blow, rushing through the air and past the edge of the wide driveshaft. Grant’s trajectory took him all the way across to the next tubular container, slamming bodily against it with an expulsion of breath.
Ullikummis charged across the cylinder, springing into the air and leaping the gap that separated him from Grant. Despite his size, Ullikummis moved with exceptional speed, Grant noted as he pulled himself onto the cylinder.
Grant raised the weapon in his hand, saw the bent barrel and thought better of it.
“Damn!”
Then Ullikummis was looming over him, more than a foot taller than the powerfully built ex-Magistrate, genetically designed solely for killing. Grant balked as Ullikummis brought his hands together, clapping them with great force just inches over Grant’s dipping head. The sound of those clapping hands was momentarily deafening, like two rocks being broken together, and Grant reeled from the effect, staggering in place.
“Shit, Kane, where are you?” he spit, his hidden Commtact live.
But there was no time to wait for an answer. Already Ullikummis was reaching for Grant again, determined to squash this thorn in his side once and for all.
Grant ducked, feeling the passage of air as one of those massive arms whizzed by just inches over his head. And then, his head still down, Grant charged forward, driving his shoulder into the great stone figure of Ullikummis.
Balanced on the subtly curving surface of the cylindrical driveshaft, Ullikummis slipped back under Grant’s blow, his feet dragging backward and ripping chunks of the surface sheen away as they did so. Grant forced himself on, head tucked in, as if battering down a door, his booted feet kicking out against the echoing surface of the shaft.
Then, incredibly, Ullikummis fell, his hulking body slamming against the roof of the cylinder with an almighty clang. It happened so fast that Grant very nearly lost his own balance, and he staggered forward in a sudden run as he tried to keep himself from falling. After a quick three steps, Grant stopped, and he turned to face Ullikummis once more, his eyes searching all around for evidence of Enlil, too.
“Enkidu,” Ullikummis cursed in his own tongue, glowering at the ex-Magistrate as he stood before him. “Always charging like a bull, even after all this time.”
Grant looked at him blankly, failing to understand the words Ullikummis spoke.
“Come on, Kane,” Grant whispered into the Commtact. “It’s now or never, man.”
* * *
WHILE SHE WAS under the surface of the nutrient bath, a strange change had come upon Brigid. Once a trusted warrior for the Cerberus organization, she had had her mind corrupted and overwhelmed by Ullikummis in his gambit to resurrect his mother and take control of Tiamat and subsequently the world. But the nutrient bath had done something, triggering a change in Brigid that no one could have foreseen. As she stumbled out of the bath, her eyes fixed on Rosalia where the beautiful Latina was reaching for her discarded katana.
“Hang fire,” Brigid said, spitting nutrient gunk from her mouth as she spoke, placing the recovered Ruger on the deck beside her.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Rosalia warned, drawing the blade back in a two-handed grip.
“You won’t have to,” Brigid replied, and Rosalia heard a softer edge to her voice than had been evident just a few minutes earlier. “Rosalia?” she queried.
“Yes,” Rosalia said, nodding warily.
“I remember you,” Brigid continued, showing no proclivity to attack the woman now. “We were in Hope together. You were a part of Tom Carnack’s group.”
“What’s your point?” Rosalia barked, her eyes scanning Brigid for any sign of attack.
“I have an eidetic memory,” Brigid said, a smile tugging at her lips. “You didn’t really think I’d forget who I was, did you?”
Chapter 19
Down in the engine room, Grant steadied himself as the juggernaut stone figure of Ullikummis came crashing toward him. Grant was weaponless now. All he had left was his strength—not a patch on Ullikummis’s—and his wits, about which the jury was still out.
Grant stepped to his right, flicking out the long tails of his Kevlar duster like a matador as Ullikummis came at him like a rocket. The trick was only halfway successful, and Grant found his left arm going numb as Ullikummis brushed against it.
Down below, the dwarfen ratlike figures were scurrying about in panic, clearing the area as Ullikummis and Grant battled atop the driveshafts.
Hurtling along like a hurricane, Ullikummis took a half-dozen paces to stop, skirting precariously close to the far edge of the shaft.
Grant turned, a grim smile crossing his features for a moment. And then the ex-Magistrate began running, sprinting across the cylindrical unit toward the great stone figure that waited at its edge.
* * *
IN A PLANE OF REALITY unseen by human eyes, Kane dropped from the tree and onto the vermilion sands below. He could not help but marvel at the way color had reappeared in this—what was it?—world.
It’s the way I interpret things, Kane reminded himself. My brain is getting information shot at it from directions it’s never known before, and all it can do is make some patchwork-quilt reality so I can at least function within it.
Is this all reality is? Kane wondered. Is what we’re seeing, the trees, the plants—is that too just a way of making sense of shapes we have no real way of comprehending? Is vision itself just an illusion?
Kane glanced ahead and to his right, searching for the statuelike figure of Ullikummis. Enlil had gone, winked out of the multisphere somehow. But Ullikummis remained, his back to Kane as his body flowed with some invisible tide. But as Kane looked, a shape seemed to blur from beyond Ullikummis’s form, like a halo cast in shadow. Kane saw faces there, things he had never seen before, things he had no name for.
Keep it together, Kane, he told himself. Keep your head together and work this out. It’s an angle, another line on the graph. That’s all this is. String theory—just string.
* * *
GRANT’S FEET POUNDED on the surface of the shaft, each footstep like a hammer blow on the cylindrical container. Seeing him approach, Ullikummis smiled—or at least gave what passed for a smile on his ugly features—stretching his arms wide to receive his attacker.
“Come, man bull,” Ullikummis growled. “Amuse me for one...single...second.”
With a wordless battle cry, Grant slammed into Ullikummis, plowing into him with such force that the two of them first butted, then fell back, the sound of impact like a crack of thunder above the churning noise of Tiamat’s engines.
Grant fell back, crashing to the surface of the long cylindrical unit, his whole body aching like a bruise where he had barged into the Annunaki rock monstrosity.
Ullikummis was not so lucky. Like Grant, he fell back, but standing at the edge of the driveshaft, he had nowhere to fall but straight down, dropping over the side and crashing fifteen feet to the deck below.
For a long moment, Grant lay there, his body crying out with pain from all sides, every muscle strained beyond belief. “Come on,” he told himself sternly. “Get up.”
With incredible effort, Grant pushed himself from the deck, lifting himself back to his feet and edging along in a pain-filled, shuffling movement. He kept his teeth clenched, and each breath came through them with a hiss, straining for release.
Grant took his time and it was thirty seconds before he reached the end of the cylinder. Slowly, his head heavy with strain, he peered over the edge.
Ullikummis lunged at him from below, clambering up the side of the drive cylinder in great leaps and bounds, literally running up the vertical side of the tank.
“Whoa!” Grant yelped, sidestepping as Ullikummis reached o
ut for him with his massive stone-clad hands.
Grant’s feet drummed against the driveshaft as he moved to avoid Ullikummis’s attack. The stone giant was atop the cylindrical drive in an instant, reaching forward once again to grab the retreating ex-Magistrate.
* * *
STRING THEORY, Kane repeated, recalling the name Lakesh had given it.
Staring at Ullikummis’s broad-shouldered back, Kane realized what he had to do. He didn’t understand this world, didn’t understand this angle he was
looking at, but he recognized himself and the things he had brought here.
Reaching down, Kane tore a strip from his frayed denim jacket, tearing the tatty hem away in a swift jerk. The hem was three feet long and about the same width as a bandage. Kane twisted the ends, wrapping them tightly between his hands. The material felt strong enough for what he had in mind.
* * *
IN AGARTHA, Balam watched as Kane rocked back and forth in the astrogator’s chair, shaking as if he was having a seizure.
“Kane, are you all right?” Balam asked gently, reaching for the Cerberus warrior.
But as he reached forward, another burst of static shot out from the chair, whizzing across the room and catching Balam a glancing blow across his arm. Balam staggered back, patting at the sleeve of his indigo robe where a spark of fire ignited.
Across the cube, Kane continued shaking back and forth in the clutches of the chair.
* * *
IN ANOTHER ANGLE, Kane was running at Ullikummis as his statuelike form crackled with energy. Clenched in Kane’s hands, the single strip of material was wrapped tautly over the knuckles of both hands, leaving a short length between them, barely a foot across.