God War

Although the child looked automatically to Brigid for compassion and comfort, she expressed no fear of Ullikummis, in spite of his monstrous appearance. Seeing the two of them together made for an incongruous sight: the girl not yet three feet in height with the tiny, birdlike build of the hybrids, while he was eight feet tall and as solid as living stone. Brigid had been surprised to see that, despite his appearance and eminent practicality, Ullikummis was capable of tenderness. He befriended the child by honoring her, the way a child will honor a parent, a man or a god.

In the curtailed week that Quav had spent at the rock-walled fortress, Ullikummis had lavished long hours speaking with her, patiently explaining her role in the Annunaki royal family, her destiny and importance to his own plans. He had done this both as a teacher and a friend, never once berating the young child for her impatience or because her attention span did not equal his.

Ullikummis was exceptionally patient, Brigid had observed as he conversed with the child, something she had not really credited before now. She had first met Ullikummis in her other life, when she had been a Cerberus warrior opposed to all things Annunaki. Ullikummis had returned to Earth in his space prison, landing in the wilds of Canada, and he had immediately set about building his own army within the structure he called Tenth City. While he was monstrous and harsh in his manner, looking back Brigid realized he had never been impatient. Even as he suffered an attack and seemingly ignoble defeat, Ullikummis himself had simply stepped back, hiding himself in the shadows and letting the Cerberus warriors see what they wanted to see, believing him killed in an incinerator explosion. At heart he was an assassin, his father’s one-time hand in darkness, and so his natural inclination was to step back, to merge with the shadows and let the world turn around him while things ran their course, secure in the knowledge he could strike when the time was right.

Brigid’s second meeting with Ullikummis had come in the Ontic Library, an undersea storeroom that housed the blueprints to reality itself. Ullikummis had accessed the library to amass more knowledge about his father from its sentient datastream, but his brutal incursion had damaged the structures of the library itself. Brigid had joined her then-colleagues from Cerberus in expelling Ullikummis from the incredible library before the damage proved irrevocable, and it had been her consciousness that had been melded with the living data to shore up the library’s defenses. Ullikummis had encountered her then, their astral forms meeting, but his perception had been so altered by the library that he had been unable to recognize her. It was only later, once the Annunaki prince was freed from the datastream, that he had realized who it was he had come in touch with—and he had decided at that moment that he needed to recruit this fearsome intellect for his own cause, lest she prove his downfall.

Ullikummis enacted a bold plan against Cerberus shortly thereafter, amassing his nascent army to attack and overwhelm their hidden base in the Bitterroot Mountains. Ullikummis had left the task of running the overthrown base in the hands of his first priest, a man called Dylan, whose primary job was to turn Brigid’s partner, Kane, into a military leader for his stone army. Dylan had failed, and Kane had turned on him and overthrown the briefly victorious regime of his enemies. But Ullikummis himself had already exited the redoubt with Brigid, bringing her to Bensalem, where he had brainwashed and reconstructed her mind for his own means. Brigid, an eminently capable woman of fearsome intellect, had tried to resist, but ultimately her personality had been broken down and remade in the form of her new self, Brigid Haight. Now Haight was Ullikummis’s new first priest, his so-called hand in darkness, as he had been for his father. And with her help, Ullikummis would bring about the next reign of the mighty Annunaki, an era over which he and Ninlil would preside.

Outside, through the open window of the rock-walled room, Brigid perceived the rays of the early-morning sun playing across the ever-changing ocean surface. It was barely dawn, the night chill still clinging heavily in the air. Gently pushing aside Little Quav, Brigid reached for the clothes that were draped over the stone chair at the end of her bed. Like everything else in Bensalem, the chair was constructed of rock and had a rough, weather-beaten look to it. As she took her single garment from the seat, two doglike creatures came wandering past the open door. They were huge, the size of lions with that same grace and majesty. Their bodies were rough, coated in a living stone that seemed to match the walls and the furniture of the room. One stared into the room for a moment, its nose in the air, and Brigid saw that it had eyes that looked sad and unmistakably human. She pushed the thought from her mind as she stepped into the leather leggings of the catsuit.

In a few moments, Brigid closed the front of the formfitting black leather suit she favored, stretching her arms out before her to affix its sleeves in place. The suit clung to her supple curves like a second skin, reflecting the faint red glow that emanated from the roiling veins in the walls. Now dressed, Brigid bent to retrieve the heavy fur cloak that she had tossed to the floor before retiring the previous evening, pulling it over her shoulders. Then, cinching the ties on the cloak, she stared across the room once more to Ullikummis, who waited in the doorway like some rudimentary statue from a primitive culture.

Meeting his hellish eyes, Brigid repeated Ullikummis’s words back to him. “The stars are aligned,” she said, knowing full well what it meant. “Thus it’s time.”

With a single nod, Ullikummis turned and left the room, his footsteps like pounding jackhammer blows on the hard stone floor. Little Quav remained in the middle of the room, abandoned and looking to Brigid for direction. The red-haired woman called Haight reached her hand down to take that of the hybrid girl’s.

“Come on, little one,” she said. “Time to meet with destiny.”

Together, Brigid and Quav followed Ullikummis through the cool, echoing corridors of the rocky fortress in some perversion of the family unit, the stone hounds trotting along at their sides like the family dogs. It was the closest Little Quav had ever known in her short life to being a part of a real family.

* * *

THE THRONE ROOM was as simple as Brigid’s living quarters, albeit larger. There were few decorations on the rough stone walls, just patterns on the rocks like veins on a leaf, along with two thick, moth-eaten curtains that had been used to partition lesser sections of the room. The windows were open, as no glass existed in the fortress island of Bensalem. Several of the windows were narrow slits, while one was wider, a circular hole in the wall behind the rock throne itself. The throne was massive, and sturdy enough to accommodate the hulking body of Ullikummis. He sat there now, his magma eyes pulsing. Two of his faithful hounds curled around the throne, their rough stone bodies melding together in the half-light of the room.

Brigid entered with Quav at her side, her pace slower than normal in deference to the girl’s shorter legs. She looked across the room to where the raised platform waited. This was the parallax point, a key site in a network of linked locations that could be accessed via a teleportational device called an interphaser. The interphasers worked by accessing these naturally occurring hyperdimensional vortices, which could be found all over the world and beyond. Interphasers then opened a quantum window between the two points, allowing their users to step through the gateway to a place that may be a thousand miles or more away. While eminently adaptable, interphasers were limited in the points they could access, although Ullikummis had tapped them in a different manner to that seen before. By applying knowledge he had retrieved from the Ontic Library, that undersea storehouse of the rules governing reality, Ullikummis could fold space during the interphase jump, subtly shifting his destination point and transferring whole armies to specific places. It was through this technique that his attack on the Cerberus redoubt had been so successful two months earlier. Once the interphaser was activated, the journey itself was instantaneous and would be over in the blink of an eye.

The parallax point itself, like the rest of the room, was carved of simple rock, seemingly not shaped by hand but by the elements themselves. It stood two feet higher than the floor of the room, with twin circles marked out on its surface concentrically. The circles were carved channels no deeper than a knuckle joint, the widest of them reaching out to just a foot before the edge of the platform itself.

Ullikummis was concentrating now, reknitting the pathways so that he could utilize the interphase gateway in a subtly different way. Brigid watched as his bright eyes dimmed, his thoughts turning within himself.

“Come on, child,” Brigid whispered to Quav, keeping her voice low. “We need to be ready for when the time comes.”

Quav clung to Brigid’s hand as the flame-haired woman led her to the dais, helping the hybrid girl up over the low step. Then, instructing the girl to remain in place, Brigid strode from the platform to an area that was masked behind one of the thick velvet curtains. She pushed the drape back, stone rings holding it in place on a stone strut that ran from wall to wall.

Behind the curtain lay a series of shelves like a bookcase, each one constructed from the same rough stone as the rest of the nightmarish sea palace. There were weapons arrayed on the upper shelves: a heavy mace constructed of stone, a leather bag filled with throwing stones, a TP-9 semiautomatic pistol with several clips of bullets.

Brigid plucked up the semiautomatic, her favored weapon when entering a combat situation, checking its breech before loading a new magazine and securing the extras in a pocket sewn into the lining of her cloak. The TP-9 was a compact but bulky pistol with a covered targeting scope across the top, all finished in molded matte black. The grip was set just off center beneath the barrel, and in the user’s hand, the unit appeared to form a lopsided square, hand and wrist making the final side and corner. Satisfied, Brigid shoved the pistol into a hip holster, twisting it slightly to secure it.

Then Brigid crouched, reaching for one of two objects that waited on the lowest shelf of the wall unit, resting on the floor. The two items were identical in design, and it was impossible to tell them apart. Pyramidal in shape, the items stood twelve inches from apex to square base, and each side of the base measured twelve inches in length. The sides were plated in a shimmering mirrored metal, its surface curved randomly so as to reflect in a strange, almost disconcerting way. These were the interphasers, the teleportational units that could be used to access a parallax point and transfer a person or persons across the quantum ether.

Gingerly, Brigid picked up the unit to the right and carried it in both hands to the platform where Little Quav was waiting. Kneeling for a moment, she flipped open a hidden door at the base of the pyramid-shaped machine, and her slender fingers traced a quick tattoo across the control buttons revealed within. The interphaser bleeped a moment, chirruping to itself as it accessed the cosmic pathways that would be used for this journey outside of traditional space.

Brigid stepped back as the interphaser began its automated ignition sequence, reaching for Quav’s hand as the unit came to life.

In his throne, Ullikummis dropped out of the meditative state he had been in, his eyes resuming their fearsome glow like the lighting of a fire.

“The final sequence begins,” he stated, the words rumbling through the throne room like distant thunder. “The endgame has arrived.”

The three-year-old child known as Quav grasped Brigid’s hand, squeezing it tighter as Ullikummis—genetically her son from four millennia before—drew himself out of the throne and strode across the room toward the raised platform containing the parallax point. Around them, the interphaser seemed to be splitting apart, a cone of many colors launching all around it, widening as it clambered upward through the room and, nonsensically, mirroring this action deep into the floor, the sight replacing the stone tiles there. Witchfire crackled within that dark swirl of colors, firing across its depths like lightning.

“I am the bringer of death,” Ullikummis chanted, “the destroyer of souls, the alpha and the omega, the vanishing point. I am the Godkiller.”

With those words, Ullikummis stepped onto the raised platform, the dogs trotting obediently along at his heels as he joined Brigid Haight and the girl who would be Ninlil amid the glowing quantum portal of the interphaser. The jump had begun.

* * *

THE CATHEDRAL BELL was chiming in Luilekkerville, a continuous droning clang pressing against the silence. Inside, the cathedral was packed. Almost one thousand individuals had crammed themselves within its confines, listening to the bell’s droning as Minister Morrow strode proudly among them, a broad, toothy grin on his heavily jowled face. Many of the congregation had seats but some were forced to stand, piling in through several doorways where the shadow of a man—elongated and alien—stretched into the aisle beyond through some quirk of the architecture. Every last building in the ville had emptied, disgorging its occupants, young or old, to attend this special service.

“Alone we were weak, lost, we were victims,” Morrow intoned as he strode up to the cathedral’s central plinth. “Alone we were afraid. Those who grew up here, who witnessed the fall of Snakefish, will recall the feelings of real fear that gripped them as their world collapsed about their ears.”

There were voices of assent from the congregation, calls of support and a hubbub of agreement from farther back among the swilling crowds.

“But together,” Minister Morrow called, thrusting his clenched right fist in the air above his head where everyone could see, “together we are strong. Together we cannot be defeated. Together we are the heralds of the glorious future, together we are the heralds of god.

“Each one of you here today is my brother, my sister,” Morrow continued. “Each one of you is a part of the future body, each one of you a building block for eternity.

“We are strong because we are stone!” Morrow shouted, opening the fist he held straight above his head. Revealed within, a rock rested on his palm, just three inches across and dark as a shadow. As the congregation cheered and whooped their support, the rock began to glow, at first faintly in a soft peachy orange, before rapidly becoming brighter until it was burning a lustrous red as rich as lava.

“We are stone,” Morrow chanted, and the people of the congregation took up the chant, shouting their allegiance to the glorious future of Ullikummis.

In Morrow’s hand, the stone glowed brighter still, illuminating the altar where the minister stood, painting his simple robes in rich scarlet and vermilion.

“We are stone,” Morrow called, and a thousand voices echoed the same words back to him. “We are stone.”

As the voices became louder, calling in time with the chiming bell, the air began to change above the minister’s head, poised as he was at the very center of the towering structure. The air seemed to take on a tangibility as a swirl of color began to form, small and faint at first but unmistakably present all the same.

The congregation continued to chant as the swirl above the minister grew bigger and more pronounced. The colors pulsed and swirled, dancing with one another like the aurora borealis, changing as they swam in the air. And somewhere deep in the midst of that multihued pattern, pencil-thin fingers of lightning began to crackle and flash.

Morrow continued to chant, his open hand raised in the air, brandishing the glowing stone like Prometheus bringing fire from the gods. The stone felt hotter now, not burning but like the feel of another person’s skin, lover to lover.

“I am stone.”

The crowd continued to repeat the phrase over and over as the wormhole opened behind their leader, widening like a circular window into the quantum ether.

Unknown to the congregation, all across the country, dozens more of the wormholes were opening as the faithful were called by Ullikummis, a widely scattered flock of believers called into service by their savior.

In Luilekkerville, the hole in space was as tall as a house now, taking up two stories of the cathedral’s innards, poised like a disk in the center of the massive enclosed space, like an eye looking into the infinite. The colors swirled and clashed and witchfire flashed across its depths, the call of Ullikummis echoing from the infinity rent to tug at the souls of the chanting congregation.

Suddenly, Morrow turned to face the expanding circular disk, seeing it properly for the first time where it swirled behind him. His lips continued to mouth the chant—“We are stone”—but the sound died before it left his throat, snatched away by the swirling elemental forces that he was staring into. Minister Morrow looked into the abyss, his human eyes trying to make sense of the fractal patterns of the quantum ether, as he led his congregation into its shining depths. The disk looked like a bruise, blacks and purples and indigo blues all mixing together as it grew larger and larger, a hundred other shades swirling within its tesseract depths.

And if the end of the world had a color, then this was it.

Chapter 2

The spaceship Tiamat was crumbling about them, chunks of its wall plating fracturing away, dropping into the ankle-deep water that seemed to fill every passageway. A man and woman were racing through the curving artery that ran in a loop at the exterior wall of the ship’s hull, and the man carried another figure in his muscular arms. He was much larger than the woman in his arms, and he made the task of carrying her seem effortless as he and his companion sought the makeshift entryway they had blasted in the ship’s hull just a few hours earlier.

Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville who now served the Cerberus operation. He was a huge man in his late thirties, wide-shouldered with skin like polished mahogany. His head was shaved clean, and he wore a trim goatee beard that surrounded his broad mouth in a black circle. His clothes were in disarray, as were those of his companions, and his heavy boots splashed in the water as he leaped over the riblike protrusions that lined the circular-walled corridor. Grant wore a long coat over his shadow suit, both of them made of black fabric, the former fabricated from a Kevlar weave. The shadow suit boasted remarkable properties. Snugly fitting its wearer like a second skin, the one-piece garment had armorlike features sufficient to deflect a blade, redistribute kinetic shock and offer protection from environmental hazards.

Grant continued to run, ducking as another chunk of the walls tumbled away in a crash of shell-like material. “Keep moving,” he instructed his companion, though the command was unnecessary. Perhaps he was really talking to himself, driving himself on as they both hurried toward the rent in the hull through which they might escape this nightmare.

Running just a few paces behind Grant was his companion, a beautiful woman with olive skin and long dark hair that swung behind her in a ponytail. In her early twenties, Rosalia was a mercenary who had recently hooked up with the Cerberus organization during the ongoing Ullikummis infiltration. She had tucked the cuffs of her combat pants into the supple leather boots she wore, kicking out with long legs to keep pace with her taller companion. Her open denim jacket showed the shadow suit she wore beneath, and she had a Ruger P-85 pistol stashed in a low-slung holster on her right hip and a katana sword tucked through her belt loop across the opposing hip. The sword was two feet in length, and the blade had been blackened by flames to the color of charcoal. Rosalia’s chest rose and fell as she took deep breaths to keep up with Grant’s long strides, and her deep brown eyes seemed to burn with rage.

Grant carried another woman in his arms, her petite frame much smaller than Rosalia’s. Her name was Domi and she was an albino, her skin a deathly white, her short hair the creamy color of bone where it framed her sharp-planed face in a pixie cut. Right now her pale flesh was marred with streaks of black where ash had smeared across her skin, and her eyes were closed in slumber. Open, those eyes were a vibrant, satanic red, like two pure rubies. Domi wore simple combat clothes in dark colors, but the clothes had been torn in places following a recent struggle.

As the group reached sight of the hole in the hull of the crumbling spaceship, Grant heard someone calling to him. Up ahead, he saw the familiar form of their other companion—a modern-day samurai warrior called Kudo, who was dressed in supple armor and had a long sword sheath depending from his belt. Kudo was one of the Tigers of Heaven, a group of fearsome warriors who had joined forces with the Cerberus exiles as they defended themselves from the hostile campaign by Ullikummis.

As Grant and Rosalia got closer, they saw that Kudo’s face was streaked red across the left-hand side where something had marred and puckered the skin, and the white of his left eye had turned a chilling bloodred. His dark hair was plastered to his head in short, wet curls.

“What happened to you?” Grant asked as they made their way together to the hole in the ruined hull.

“I mistimed the charge,” Kudo explained wryly before asking about his missing partner, Kishiro.

“He didn’t make it,” Grant admitted solemnly as he ducked through the door-sized hole that an explosive charge had left in the ship’s outer hull.

The ship was grounded. In fact, it had never flown, at least not in its current form. An Annunaki starship of legendary repute, Tiamat had been mistakenly identified in ancient Sumerian mythology as the mother to the Annunaki race of space gods. More accurately, she was a mother ship, an organic machine that housed the genetic templates of the Annunaki. She had returned to Earth’s orbit several years ago at the start of the twenty-third century, downloading the genetic codes that brought about the Annunaki royal family’s rebirth from their cocoonlike shells as the nine hybrid barons, but had later self-destructed in an explosion that rocked the skies. Grant had been there when the destruct order had been given, and he had watched from the porthole of a fleeing lifeboat as Tiamat went up in flames.

However, the spacecraft had reappeared just a few weeks before on the banks of the River Euphrates, Iraq, her familiar dragon shape towering over an empty city formed of her skeletal wings. Grant had no possible way of knowing, but the ship had been grown from a seed planted by Enlil, the cruelest of the Annunaki overlords. Enlil had tapped the ship’s incredible reservoir of knowledge to fast-track an army of Annunaki, warping the DNA of any human who came close to the skeletal city. However, something had been wrong deep within the codes of Tiamat herself, and the ship was now deteriorating at an incredible rate, falling apart as its huge water tanks bled out.

Outside, the sun sat high in the sky, its midmorning burn pounding warmly against Grant’s skin.

“We should destroy it,” Kudo insisted, staring angrily back at the shovel-shaped head of the spaceship that rested on the riverbank.

“We don’t have anything that can do that,” Grant told him as Rosalia emerged from the raw-edged hole in the hull, “but we can come back. Bomb the wicked thing out of existence once and for all.”

* * *

DEEP INSIDE the dragon-form ship, deep in the belly of the beast, Enlil was fighting for his life.

Enlil, a high-ranking member of Annunaki royalty, and self-styled overlord of the human race, was a beautiful creature. He stood over six feet tall, with a crest of spines atop his head that added almost a foot to his already impressive height. His scaled skin was the color of gold dipped in blood, of sunset in the tropics, and it covered his muscular body like a suit of malleable armor. His chest and arms were bare, as were his clawed feet, while his legs were covered in loose, billowing breeks. Other than that, Enlil wore a bloodred cloak cinched around his shoulders that trailed down to brush at the tops of his ankles. The cloak was torn, for it had suffered during the current struggle with his enemies.