by James Axler
Kane’s feet pounded on the sands, striking with great blows of sound and fury, spirit and determination.
* * *
ABOARD TIAMAT, Grant found himself backing along one of the great engine capacitors as Ullikummis chased him. The great stone monster hurtled at him in great, loping strides, each one encompassing twice the distance that Grant could step.
“My father is dead,” Ullikummis gritted, his eyes fixed on the retreating figure of Grant. “He taught me never to leave loose ends unsnipped.”
Grant continued running away. “I really don’t want to be snipped,” he muttered as he rushed along the curved surface of the shaft.
The ex-Mag was close to the end with Ullikummis breathing down his neck as he closed in. He would need to jump to the next cylindrical structure, he realized, because there was nowhere left to run. Head down, Grant drove himself on, his legs screaming in pain as he forced himself to keep moving. But as he reached the edge of the cylinder, Ullikummis just inches behind him, Grant slipped, careening over and over, the long tails of his coat wrapping over his body. His boot had slipped on some leaking oil or something, Grant realized as he crashed down to the cylinder’s surface.
At the same moment, Ullikummis was reaching for Grant, his right hand grasping for the back of the ex-Mag’s duster. His hand snatched at empty air as Grant sailed head over heels along the last part of the stardrive unit, sending Ullikummis off balance for just a second.
When he recovered, Ullikummis saw Grant lying there, sprawled uncomfortably on the tubular driveshaft, utterly helpless. Ullikummis paced toward him, his mighty feet striking resounding blows on the metal-sounding shaft, blows that were loud even above the thousand-boiling-kettles symphony of the room.
Ullikummis loomed over Grant, his shadow covering the apekin where he struggled to get up. Ullikummis leaned forward to lift him, but as he did so the
Annunaki prince became aware of another presence just behind him, reaching for him from out of the quantum ether.
* * *
ROSALIA STARED at the red-haired woman standing before her, wondering if this, too, was a trick. Brigid Baptiste, latterly Haight, seemed passive now, offering no indication that she planned to attack. Rosalia was a survivor who lived by her wits, and she did so in large part by being a shrewd judge of character. The woman before her had caught her on the hop less than five minutes before by the old ruse of playing possum. While she seemed genuine now, the thought picked at Rosalia’s brain, Might this too be a trick?
“Who are you?” Rosalia asked, the black sword poised upright in ready position.
“Baptiste,” Brigid replied. “Brigid Baptiste. And you would be Rosalia, correct?”
Rosalia nodded, watching the red-haired woman intensely. Nothing in Brigid’s body language suggested a trick. Indeed, her body language had subtly changed since Rosalia had first encountered her in this small room with its stone egg and pool of genetic gunk.
“Might I ask,” Brigid began, making a show of her empty hands, the discarded Ruger still at her feet, “who you are working for? It’s just that I get the impression we were fighting.”
“We were,” Rosalia confirmed. Then, at Brigid’s urging look, the dark-haired merc added, “Cerberus.”
Brigid shook her head, taking a pace forward. She stopped when she saw Rosalia jostle the sword in her hands.
“I don’t intend to hurt you,” Brigid said. “Not yet anyway. Jury’s still out on the longer term. Ullikummis—you know the name?—well, he did something to me, assaulted me, here, in my head. If you’re here with Cerberus, then I should speak with them. I have to figure out what’s happened.”
“You were trying to kill me is what’s happened,” Rosalia spit contemptuously. “The innocent act’s good, but I’m not buying it.”
“Listen to me,” Brigid said. “I have what’s known as an eidetic—or photographic—memory. It takes a lot to fool my brain, and even then it can’t be fooled for long. Ullikummis kidnapped me and tried to get inside my head.”
“Yeah,” Rosalia recalled. “I was...there,” she finished lamely, withholding for now the information that she was a part of the attacking force that took over the Cerberus redoubt. If Brigid was telling the truth, then she didn’t want to spook her.
“But, you see,” Brigid continued as if explaining it to herself, “you can’t brainwash someone with an eidetic memory—they have too strong a connection to their past. What he did was a psychic assault, and I knew I was in no position to beat him off, so I did the only thing I could. I hid.”
“Hid?” Rosalia asked.
“I hid my mind,” Brigid clarified. “There was a trick I learned back when I was in Russia on a field mission. It involved focusing on a pattern that allowed the viewer to meditate on a set frequency.”
Rosalia listened, realizing that Brigid was speaking as much to herself as to her, trying to piece together all that had happened these past two months since she had disappeared.
“Recollecting the meditative tool—the mandala—allowed me to hide my mind in a place called Krylograd on the astral plane,” Brigid continued. “It put me somewhere that Ullikummis could not reach.”
“You’ve been ‘gone’ for almost two months,” Rosalia said.
Brigid cursed. “The time sense in Krylograd is all askew. I didn’t realize. What happened?” she added, her expression like that of a little girl.
“Ullikummis made you his bitch,” Rosalia summarized. “Or whatever was left of you, I guess. We’ve been working together to find you....”
“‘We’?”
“Kane, Grant, Lakesh...” Rosalia clarified.
“So you really are working for Cerberus now?” Brigid questioned.
“Temp position,” Rosalia told her, “until something better comes up.” She gave a wink.
Brigid turned her head, searching around the room. “Where are we? Looks kind of like a Chalice of Rebirth.”
“Big spaceship name of Tiamat,” Rosalia told her.
Brigid’s eyebrows rose. “In space?” she asked.
“No, not unless there’s been some colossal fuck up since I last checked,” Rosalia assured her.
Brigid shook her head, running her hand absentmindedly through the locks of her wet hair. “I took a dunking?” she asked, staring down at the pit that dominated the room. “A nutrient bath made up of birth stuff. Used to enable genetic download of personality templates in the Annunaki bodies, right?”
Rosalia shrugged. “Big pond, stone egg, that’s all I know, chica.”
“We are all genetic templates waiting for our download,” Brigid proposed. “Created in the womb, each of us awaits the facets that will make us individuals, that will make up the things we will carry with us throughout our lives. I’d hidden my mind leaving this shell to Ullikummis, to fill with his values, his truths, whatever. But the nutrient bath cleared all the crap out of my system—it set me free to reengage my real mind with my body. Without that, I might not have come back.”
And then Brigid laughed. “Excuse me, but that’s brilliant.”
“It wasn’t intentional,” Rosalia admitted with a shrug.
“Doesn’t matter,” Brigid told her, her face the picture of inspired joy. “Do you realize that, thanks to an Annunaki cheat, I’ve managed to be reborn. That’s just incredible.”
But Rosalia’s happiness was less pronounced. Instead, her attention was drawn to the thing behind Brigid, the stone chrysalis that stood silently in the middle of the nutrient pool. As she watched it, a seam appeared along the Y-axis of the ovoid structure, top to bottom, and it began to split apart.
“Speaking of rebirth...” Rosalia said, indicating the stone egg.
And then, both she and Brigid Baptiste reared back as the two halves of the stone structure fell away into the pool o
f genetic debris to leave a single figure standing before them. Six feet in height and of gracile form, the figure was covered in shimmering green scales the color of spring leaves, and she stood naked before them with no sense of shame. It was Ninlil, goddess of the Annunaki, Lady of the Air. She stood reborn, four thousand years after her last Earth death. And she didn’t look at all happy about it.
Chapter 20
In the engine room, Ullikummis turned back and saw the spectral figure of Kane reaching toward him from beyond the quantum veil. There was a length of cord stretched tightly in the apekin’s hands. Before he could move, Kane looped the cord over the stone giant’s head, whipping it down until it was snug against his throat.
Ullikummis reached back, grasping for Kane where he’d attacked him from the numerous angles of the unseen dimensions, but his hand swept through thin air. Kane was still in the angles, driving his vengeance through them and into the world beyond.
“You want string theory?” Kane snarled as he tightened the cord around his foe’s throat. “Here’s what I know!”
With a yank, Ullikummis felt himself pulled back, the air bursting from his throat.
From his supine position on the driveshaft, Grant watched Ullikummis topple backward to the surface of the cylindrical unit. The stone giant was clawing at his throat as if some invisible cord were cinched there, yet it was something Grant could not see.
“Kane?” Grant asked. “Is that you?”
* * *
“YEAH, IT’S ME all right,” Kane replied.
Within a different angle, Kane was pulling on the strip of material, pulling it back farther, forcing Ullikummis to fall.
Kane pulled harder as the stone god struggled, kicking backward to keep Ullikummis from recovering. For the moment, Kane’s multidimensional attack was holding Ullikummis, but it couldn’t last long; the stone monster did not need air, so there was no way to strangle him.
“Balam? Lakesh?” Kane called. “Do we have anything to hold this son of a bitch?”
“We’re working on it, Kane,” Lakesh replied, “but nothing is presenting itself. Short of conducting a bombing raid on the spaceship, we’re out of options.”
“Can that be done?” Kane asked.
“With personnel as they are?” Lakesh replied. “No.”
* * *
MEANWHILE, Balam had a plan of his own. He had brought something from elsewhere in the vast storehouse, speculating that Kane might use it when the time came. Unrolling the matlike object, Balam laid it out across the floor of the cube by Kane’s feet. The material was a three-foot square of dark green, and marked out upon it in golden thread were concentric circles like a bull’s-eye. It was a portable parallax point, the kind that Kane and his team had only ever seen once before.
“There is a way,” Balam said, placing himself beside the navigator’s chair, “but you’ll need to open your eyes. I have a parallax point that can be shifted....”
Squirming in the chair, his body held in place by the eerie, living creepers, Kane gritted his teeth. “You’re nuts, Balam,” he snarled. “I can’t hold on to my presence here, as well as there.”
“Once viewed,” Balam continued, “you could use the navigation circuitry to move the parallax point, creating a warp through space.”
“Balam, are you even listening?” Kane growled as he struggled in the seat. “If I open my eyes, I’ll lose whatever it is I have here. I’ll lose Ullikummis.”
Balam stared at the parallax point laid out on the floor of the room and he shook his head. “Friend Kane,” he said solemnly, “to utilize the parallax point you will need to look at it. I’m afraid that there is simply no other way.”
* * *
KANE WRENCHED back on Ullikummis once again, dragging him across the abandoned beach in the middle of the desolate angles. Ullikummis had been off balance, but he was recovering, Kane could tell. Even as he listened to Balam explain the situation, Ullikummis reached back and clapped his hands together in a boom like thunder. Kane fell back, struggling to keep hold of the twisted cord around the stone figure’s neck.
“You’re playing in the big league now, Balam,” Kane snarled. “Find a way.”
* * *
IN THE ANTE-NURSERY, Ninlil of the Annunaki stepped from the stone womb, her face a picture of sadistic delight.
“I live,” she declared in ancient Sumerian tongue, “I breathe. The download is completed.”
From the edge of the nutrient pool, Brigid and Rosalia watched aghast as Ninlil took another step forward. She was beautiful, her scales a pale green like the spring leaves on a plant, her lines sleek and her skin shimmering beneath the violet lighting of the room. She stood over six feet tall, slender with a pleasing curve to the swell of her bare breasts and naked hips.
“No,” Brigid spit, “this can’t happen. I won’t let it.”
More practical, Rosalia simply grabbed her Ruger pistol from where it had fallen and aimed it at the approaching Annunaki, directing a bullet between the thing’s eyes. The revolver went off with a loud bang, and the 9 mm slug raced to its target, striking Ninlil midforehead. The bullet ricocheted off the armorlike scales of the goddess’s skin, but the shock of impact was enough to make her step back, her feet splashing through the nutrient-filled waters of the pool.
“You can’t kill her,” Brigid said. “Not like that.”
“Then what?” Rosalia asked.
Brigid racked her brains, recalling all she could of what Ullikummis had taught her.
“Hold my hand,” Brigid said, running into the nutrient pool, splashing liquid everywhere as she charged at the reborn Annunaki goddess.
“What are you doing?” Rosalia demanded as she was dragged into the pool with the red-haired archivist.
“Ullikummis showed me the Annunaki way of seeing the world,” Brigid said as she reached for Ninlil before the stone egg. “They see time as infinite but mutable. Movement is time, and an action can be reversed.”
As she spoke, Brigid slapped her palm against Ninlil, striking her chest and shoving her back into the cracked shell of the stone chrysalis. Ninlil stumbled into it, falling back into its embrace.
“There’s enough of that other me,” Brigid said, “of Haight, to remember how to do this. It’s just the same as finding the hidden door to Agartha. But it won’t stay with me much longer.”
“What are you babbling about?” Rosalia snapped angrily. “You can’t live both in their world and ours.”
“I know,” Brigid replied, flicking her gaze on Rosalia for just a second. When she did so, Rosalia saw the darkness return to the woman’s expression, the sinister fires of hate burning within her emerald eyes. “Anchor me.”
Rosalia grabbed the woman’s other arm as Brigid pressed her palm against Ninlil’s body, shunting her back into the cocoon. Around them, the nutrient bath continued to bubble, dark lines streaming through its milky concoction of amino acids.
Caught in the chrysalis, the beautiful figure of Ninlil seemed to shudder in place, her mouth opening in a silent scream.
* * *
IN THE ENGINE ROOM, Grant scrambled back as Ullikummis’s body started to crackle with energy. The power was emanating from around his neck, but Grant could not see where it was originating from. The eerie energy ringed Ullikummis’s throat like a necklace, sparks blasting out in furious red dots that hung in the air for a second before winking out to be replaced by more of the same.
From the floor level below, Grant could hear the worried cries of the mechanics, and he looked out into the vast engine room to see what they were doing. One by one they were running away from the scene with Ullikummis, scrambling along the aisles that ran between the great cylinders that powered Tiamat. Grant figured he ought to take that as his cue and get out of there, too.
Standing
, Grant activated his Commtact. “Kane, you got this?” he asked.
“Not sure,” Kane grunted back, his voice strained.
As Grant watched, another blast of coruscating energy sparked from Ullikummis’s throat. It was as if the god prince was being torn apart.
* * *
KANE YANKED BACK on the struggling body of Ullikummis, holding his frightening form on the sand as he fought against him. He looked like a churning volcano now, his magma energies smoldering into the air with relentless rage. Kane held the choking rope in place as Ullikummis lunged for him, one mighty magma arm cutting the impossible landscape as he struck out at Kane.
Kane grunted, feeling the blow cuff him across the left ear, but also feeling it somewhere else, somewhere deep inside. Whatever level this battle was being fought on, it was as much spiritual as physical.
Kane held in place, pulling harder against the cord that strangled Ullikummis. And as he struggled, Kane heard Balam speak from nearby.
“Kane, I have an idea,” Balam said.
“Make it quick,” Kane spit, struggling with the effort.
“We have been linked at an ocular level,” Balam said, “granting you the ability to see despite the infection.”
“Faster,” Kane growled impatiently.
Beneath him, Ullikummis twisted his mighty body, snagging the cord and wrenching it from his throat in three quick pulls. Kane felt his hands burn as the cord was torn from them.
“I shall reverse the way the link works,” Balam explained, “allowing you to see what I am looking at.”
“You can do that?” Kane asked, watching Ullikummis pull himself back to his full height, burning lava cascading across his ominous silhouetted form.
“I can try,” Balam said hopefully. “Stand by.”
Kane watched as the burning form of Enlil’s son came charging at him across the cool vermilion sands. Kane stretched out his arms, as ready as he would ever be to wrestle a child of the multiplanes.