Genesis Sinister

Chapter 2

Brigid Baptiste was sick of the questions. A member of the resistance group known as the Cerberus organization, Brigid had been deeply involved in a war between two would-be gods, Ullikummis and Enlil, who were in fact part of an ancient race of aliens called the Annunaki. With her Cerberus colleagues, Brigid had been battling the Annunaki for several years, striving to prevent their takeover of planet Earth and the absolute subjugation of the human spirit. But during the most recent skirmish with the insidious aliens, Brigid had been taken prisoner by Ullikummis, rogue upstart of the Annunaki. The stone god had turned her mind against her, brainwashed her into servitude. For a time she had taken the name of Brigid Haight and acted as Ullikummis’s hand in darkness, helping to manipulate events so that Ullikummis could breathe new life into the reincarnated form of his mother and seize control of Earth and her peoples.

Gifted with an eidetic memory that granted her perfect recall, Brigid had used a mind trick to hide her own personality in a meditative trance, leaving her body to function solely as a shell controlled by the wicked purpose of Ullikummis. But she had become lost in the trance, and when her mind had finally been reawakened, Brigid found that her body had wrought terrible atrocities, killing innocents and betraying her closest friends.

The war itself was over. Less than a week earlier, Ullikummis had led his million-strong army in a final push on Enlil’s stronghold on the banks of the Euphrates. Ultimately, the attack had failed, with enormous casualties on both sides. Cerberus had been in the thick of things, striving to the very limits of their abilities to halt the incredible God War that had erupted, twisting it from within. And for a while, almost to the very end of that final, cataclysmic battle, Brigid had stood with Ullikummis, opposed to the forces of man. She had a woman to thank for her final change of heart, a Cerberus fighter called Rosalia who had managed to break the meditative spell and free Brigid’s mind from its hiding place beyond time.

Ever since then, Brigid had been plagued by questions. Her colleagues had been concerned for her, which was not only natural but touching—something so very human that it encompassed everything that the Cerberus organization represented. But Brigid didn’t have any answers; she was still trying to put the pieces together herself. It was like waking from some horrible nightmare, only to be told that the nightmare had been real after all.

Now Brigid stood on the wide stone steps that led down to the River Ganges in India, the morning sun beating on her back. She was a tall and slender woman in her late twenties, with emerald eyes and flame-red hair that cascaded down her back in an elegant sweep of curls. Her skin was pale and she showed a wide expanse of forehead that suggested intelligence, along with full lips that suggested passion. In truth, Brigid could be defined by both of those aspects, and many more besides. She wore a white one-piece suit, the standard uniform of the Cerberus organization, and she had augmented this with a light jacket that was already making her feel too warm even before the sun had properly reached its full intensity.

Beside Brigid stood another woman dressed in similar clothes, enthusiastically gazing out at the rushing waters of the Ganges. This was Mariah Falk, a thin woman in her early forties, with short dark hair that showed flecks of white running through it. Though not conventionally pretty, Mariah had an engaging smile and a genial nature that put most people at ease. A geologist, Mariah had been with Cerberus a long time, ever since being awakened from a cryogenic suspension facility she had been placed in back in the twenty-first century. It had been her idea to travel to India, using the teleportation system that the Cerberus team relied on.

“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Mariah said, staring across the wide expanse of river where locals were washing clothes, hefting buckets of water for private use, and where the local holy men had come to wash the soles of their feet.

Brigid watched, too, as a clutch of children ran past them on the stone steps and leaped into the water, giggling as they splashed one another. All human life was here, she realized, going about its business, oblivious to the great war that had been fought just a few days before, a war that had been for their very souls.

The water itself was brown with silt where movements churned up the riverbed, and it had that smell to it, Brigid recognized, the smell of muddy puddles after a hard rainfall.

“Clem brought me here once,” Mariah continued enthusiastically. “He said that the Hindus believe the Ganges is the source of all life and that bathing in it will wash away a person’s sins.” She turned to Brigid then, smiling her bright, hopeful smile.

Brigid just stared, watching the water the way one might watch an insect bat against the outside of a windowpane, with distracted disinterest.

“Brigid, I don’t know what happened to you,” Mariah said gently, “but I like to think that Clem would have said to bring you here, if he’d still been alive.”

Mariah had lost Clem Bryant in the God War, never having had the chance to tell him that she was in love with him.

Slowly Brigid dipped her head in the faintest of nods. “Clem was a good man,” she said quietly.

“He was,” Mariah agreed. “I really miss him. We all lost something in the war, Brigid. I lost...hope for a while.”

Brigid looked at the geologist, saw the worry lines on her face and around her eyes. She looked older than Brigid remembered. The war had placed a strain on everyone.

“Do you want a dip?” Mariah asked, inclining her head encouragingly toward the river. “Wash away your sins, once-in-a-lifetime offer.”

Brigid shook her head. “You go,” she said. “I’ll wait right here.”

There, on the sandy stone steps that lined the riverbank, Mariah stripped off the white jumpsuit, revealing a modest swimsuit underneath. “Whether the river really does wash away people’s sins or not, you can’t keep blaming yourself for what happened,” she told Brigid.

Brigid just looked at the rushing water, leaning down until she was sitting on one of the wide steps, her legs stretched out before her.

Mariah didn’t bother saying anything else. She had thought a trip to India might pull Brigid out of her blue funk. The Cerberus team was still engaged with the massive cleanup of their redoubt in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana. The redoubt had been infiltrated and overwhelmed by Ullikummis and his army, but Brigid had seemed distant, emotionally disengaged, unable to be of any help. Yet the trip hadn’t seemed to do anything for her mood. She remained withdrawn, as if in mourning.

Brigid watched as Mariah waded into the river, waters lapping at her ankles and then her knees, then higher until she was in it past her hips. The geologist crouched, letting the cool waters lap against her skin, smiling as it tickled.

It would take more than water to wash away her sins, Brigid knew. In her guise as Brigid Haight, she had been a part of the campaign to betray and cage humankind. To cleanse her of her sins would take a miracle, something with the power of a nuke. She watched in silence as Mariah ducked under the water, letting it run through her hair as all around her the locals continued going about their business seemingly without a care in the world. It was as if nothing had happened at all.

* * *

CERBERUS WAS A MESS. The familiar operations room that sat at the hub of the redoubt complex looked as if a bomb had hit it. No, not a bomb, Lakesh corrected himself—an avalanche.

Lakesh was in his mid-fifties, with dusky skin, clear blue eyes and an aquiline nose over his refined mouth. His black hair was swept back in a tidy design, hints of gray showing at the temples. His full name was Mohandas Lakesh Singh and he had run the Cerberus operation since its inception. In fact, he had been at this redoubt, off and on, for the best part of 250 years, dating back to before the nuclear holocaust that had so dramatically changed the world at the end of the twentieth century. A physicist and cyberneticist of some renown in his day, Lakesh had worked on the original mat-trans system at this very redoubt. Cryogenic freezing and a program of organ replacement had kept Lakesh alive far longer than his natural years. In short, Lakesh had seen a lot in his life, and a lot of it had been in this very room in the heart of a mountain.

The room featured two aisles of computer desks, and one wall was dominated by a Mercator relief map showing Earth covered in lighted pathways that traced the routes available to the matter-transfer system at any given time. The mat-trans units were designed for military use back in the latter half of the twentieth century. The Cerberus mat-trans unit was located in its own chamber in the far corner of the room. Tinted brown armaglass walls encompassed its powerful machinery. With just the flick of a switch, the mat-trans could hurl a person across the quantum ether to a similar unit many miles away. Though primarily concentrated in mainland America, the mat-trans units stretched across all continents and even as far as the moon.

The operations room was staffed around the clock, with people checking the live feeds and liaising with field agents in their self-appointed role of protecting humankind. Right now, however, the room was mostly populated by a cleanup crew that was using a combination of ultrasonic generators and good old-fashioned brute force to remove the strange infestation that had threatened to consume the redoubt.

The Cerberus redoubt was initially a military facility located high in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, where it had remained largely forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a strange mythology had grown up around the mountains, their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement was to be found in the flatlands some miles away, consisting of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

Hidden away as it was, the redoubt had required few active measures to discourage visitors, so when it had been attacked by Ullikummis and his forces the personnel had been both surprised and dumbfounded. With a force of just fifty troops, Ullikummis had taken control of the redoubt, altering its interior dimensions and changing the very shape of the rooms themselves as he transformed it into a brutal Life Camp.

Ullikummis himself was the shamed scion of the Annunaki bloodline, and had been medically altered to look like a monster carved from stone. Among other genetic enhancements, Ullikummis exhibited a psionic control over rock, and had employed this to radically alter the whole of the redoubt, covering everything in a fresh skin of stone. Ullikummis had other powers, too, including his so-called obedience stones, semisentient shards of rock that could influence and control a person’s thoughts. Ullikummis and his agents had secretly placed these obedience stones in several of the Cerberus personnel prior to the attack on the redoubt, and it had been these hidden allies within who had allowed the great stone Annunaki to take over the complex with such ease.

When the redoubt had come back under Cerberus’s control, the personnel had begun the slow process of cleaning away the stone and replacing the damaged stock beneath. It had been four days now, and Lakesh wondered if he could see any progress at all. The ops room was still covered in a spiderweb of rock, thick stone fingers clawing across every surface and every wall, obliterating the old familiar sights he had been used to for so long.

Outside was little different. Just beyond the rollback door where the garish three-headed hellhound had been painted many years earlier, lending the Cerberus facility its name, thick posts of rock lined the plateau, barring the entryway to the redoubt for anything wider than a human. Even now, workers were chipping away at those pillars of stone, breaking them down into gravel and dust.

“I’m sorry it’s such a mess in here,” Lakesh said as he offered a seat to the beautiful woman who had come to speak with him. “You haven’t caught us at our best.”

Rosalia shrugged indifferently. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m not staying.” Rosalia was long of limb with thick, dark hair that reached past her shoulders to halfway down her back. In her early twenties, Rosalia wore loose clothes, a pale skirt that brushed her ankles and a white cotton blouse that she had left half unbuttoned. Where her olive skin could be seen it was tanned a beautiful golden. Rosalia had first met one of the Cerberus field teams as an adversary, but she had joined their ranks during their campaign against Ullikummis and had proved her worth many times over.

“You’ve been a real asset to us, Rosalia,” Lakesh told her. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to stay?”

Rosalia looked around the room, as if seeing it for the first time. “This? It’s not my scene,” she said. “You’ll be fine without me.”

And there it was, Lakesh thought. That remarkable arrogance that had typified Rosalia and her behavior within the Cerberus organization. The woman was competent—there was no question about it—but she was very aware of that fact. Whatever she had done, she made it clear that she had done it as a favor to Cerberus, not the other way around.

Kane, an incredibly gifted field agent and a lynchpin of the Cerberus team, had brought her on board. He had been trapped in the Life Camp at the time, and he had needed Rosalia’s help to escape and thus free the other Cerberus captives. But he had seen something in her and had asked her to help them for the duration. With Ullikummis now destroyed, Rosalia felt that her time with Cerberus had reached its natural end.

“Where will you go?” Lakesh asked, raising his voice to be heard over the sounds of chiseling going on just behind his shoulder.

“Somewhere,” Rosalia told him, as ever giving almost nothing away about herself.

“Cerberus owes you,” Lakesh said, “and I would like to see us pay our debts. If there’s anything I can do, or anything you need from the people of this facility, you need only ask.”

Rosalia stifled a laugh. “The first time I met your people—” she began.

“The slate is clean,” Lakesh cut in. “Whatever you did before you came here is forgotten. I promise.”

Rosalia nodded with gratitude. “You know, there is one thing,” she said. “I was planning to go see some people I... Some acquaintances. They’re down south. It’s quite a journey or I would have gone there sooner. You have your tech, the interphaser and the mat-trans. Think you can maybe give me a little push in the right direction?”

A broad smile appeared on Lakesh’s features. He was glad to be able to help the normally cagey young woman. “Where is it you need to go?” he asked.

“There’s a town close to the border, Mexico,” Rosalia said. “That side, not this.”

Lakesh was already tapping at the computer terminal that dominated his desk. The screen still had tendrils of stone across it like a cracked windshield, but he could see enough to get what he needed. “Whereabouts, exactly?”

“The place has gone by many names,” Rosalia said, “and it never once appeared on any map. I was told it was set up by a bandit who made himself its uncrowned king way back before the nukecaust. He meant it as a place where other outlaws could retreat and maybe retire. These days it’s a place of tranquillity and learning, high in the mountains, away from the villes.”

“Do you have coordinates?” Lakesh asked.

Rosalia nodded, tapping on the illuminated map on his computer screen. “Get me close enough, I’ll hoof it from there.”

“I’ll have to track down the nearest entry point,” Lakesh said, “which may take a while with the—”

“Everything?” Rosalia said brightly, gesturing around the ruined room.

Lakesh nodded. “Yes, with the ‘everything’ right now. Leave it with me—you’ll ship out before the day’s over.”

Rosalia nodded, pushing herself up from the swivel chair and making her way to the doors of the ops room. Rough stone ran along the edges of the doors, and they still wouldn’t close properly. A worker called Farrell, with goatee beard and hoop earring, was using a hammer and chisel to slowly chip away the offending rock, piece by piece.

Looking up from his computer, Lakesh eyed Rosalia wonderingly. “What’s there?” he asked, unable to contain himself.

“My old school,” Rosalia said in response before leaving the room.

* * *

BLACK JOHN JEFFERSON drifted back to swirling consciousness, a burning pain urgent in his gut. His eyes flickered open, gazing straight up and into the glare of the sun overhead. He saw it but could not feel it; instead his skin felt cold.

All around he could hear the sounds of rushing water, as if someone had opened a plug and let the whole damn ocean in.

Beneath him the deck of the ship lurched, and Black John was sent sliding across it. He had to dig his heels in to stop himself going any farther. He felt as if he would be sick, and he tilted his aching head to one side, spitting out the warm mouthful of blood that threatened to fill it.

Suddenly the deck of La Segunda Montaña rocked violently to one side once again, and Black John struggled to pull himself up to a sitting position. The deck was wet beneath him, water mixing with his own blood and the blood of others as he tried to make sense of it. He stared at it, trying to remember what had happened, the blood swilling and churning in the clear water, eddying in little whirls of red.

He had shot him. That was what had happened, wasn’t it? He had shot Fern Salt, turning on him after he had snuffed the straw-haired harlot before her screaming gave him any more of a headache. Hadn’t worked. He had one hell of a headache now, so much so he reached up to his forehead with a curse. When he did so, he found the slick wound there, cried out in surprise and at the furious twinge of pain.

“Fuck!”

The boat lurched again, its prow disappearing beneath the waves once more, bobbing up for a moment before disappearing one final time. He was on a sinking ship, scuttled by his own men—shot and left for dead.

“Those mutinous bastards,” he muttered, pulling himself up until he was standing, feeling queasy.

The wound in his skull was making him light-headed, so much so he couldn’t tell if it was the boat that was lurching or himself. Then another wave hit the sinking scow, and Black John stumbled as he tried to retain his balance.

The sound of rushing water was becoming more restrained, and Black John realized what that meant. The ship had all but sunk; there wasn’t much left for the ocean to fill before she took her.

Beside him, a body floated past, a tanned man with a gaping wound across his belly, guts spewing forth like the writhing tentacles of an octopus.

“Better you than me,” Black John muttered as the body floated away, even as the deck disappeared beneath his feet, covered by a carpet of ocean.

Beneath his feet, La Segunda Montaña finally sank from view, leaving Black John floating alongside six dead bodies on the ocean waves.

Black John was a pirate and sadist, but most of all he was a survivor. He would survive this. Somehow he would survive and bring bloody revenge on the crew that had betrayed him.

Chapter 3

The God War was over.

The mop-up, however—now, that would take a little longer.

Kane, Grant and Edwards stepped out of the rain and made their way past the open double doors of the old aircraft hangar and into the grumbling crowd that waited beyond. Within, close to forty or fifty people were waiting, the muttering sounds of their voices echoing from the high ceiling.

“Just like old times, isn’t it?” Kane said under his breath as the three men entered the huge room.

Edwards nodded. “Yeah, it’s a regular triple-P, all right.”

“Triple-P” was slang for a Pedestrian Pit Patrol, a task all three men had had to perform in their past lives as Magistrates for ville authorities, lives all three had put behind them.

At some point in time, the building they entered had been used to store aircraft and automobiles, playthings of the very rich. That was before the nukecaust had changed the rules of the world, and civilization had been dealt such a blow that it had seemed for a while as if it might never recover. Even now, two hundred years later, these places still existed, abandoned and almost forgotten, relics of a bygone age just waiting to be put to use once more.

The ceiling dripped rainwater through gaping holes, and what glass remained in the windows was white with birds’ droppings. Right now, even as the orderly crowd gathered, the sound of pigeons cooing trilled through the building, a sonic bed that was almost subliminal in its constancy.

Kane glanced up at the ceiling, watching for a moment as two pigeons took flight one after the other, a third joining them a moment later, weaving through the high girders that held the roof in place in a fluttering of gray feathers. The crowd ignored them.

In his early thirties, Kane was a tall man with a strong build that even his loose denim jacket could not disguise. With wide shoulders and rangy limbs, his physique resembled that of a wolf. He had the nature of a wolf, too, both a loner and pack leader depending on what the fates threw at him. His dark hair was cropped short and he was clean shaved for the first time in more than a month. As an ex-Magistrate, Kane was one of the enforcers of the now-fallen baronies that had dominated the former United States. He had been exiled from the barony of Cobaltville after stumbling upon a conspiracy that had threatened the very integrity of the system he was pledged to protect. Exiled along with his Magistrate partner Grant and archivist Brigid Baptiste, Kane had been recruited into the Cerberus operation in its infancy. Ever since, he had been battling against the Annunaki threat to Earth in all its myriad forms, and most recently he had taken down Ullikummis in a battle that raged not simply across Earth but through multiple planes of reality. Standing in a decrepit aircraft hangar amid a gaggle of other humans, Kane was glad to get back to something approaching normality once more.

The two men walking at Kane’s side were similarly intimidating men. The first of these was Grant, Kane’s longtime brother-in-arms whose relationship with Kane dated from way back to his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate. Tall and broad-shouldered, Grant was an imposing figure with ebony skin and not so much as an ounce of fat on his body. His hair was shaved close to his skull, and he had sported his trademark gunslinger’s mustache. In his mid-thirties, Grant wore a long black duster made from Kevlar weave. The coat skimmed the tops of his boots, giving him a funereal look.

The other man was called Edwards, who was similarly well built. He had chosen to forgo a jacket, leaving his rippling arm muscles cinched beneath the tight sleeves of his dark cotton shirt. He was closer in age to Kane. Like Grant, his hair was shaved close to his skull, drawing attention to his bullet-bitten right ear. During the war with Ullikummis, Edwards had been duped into acting in the interests of the enemy through a hidden implant in his skull. That implant had been removed via ultrasonic surgery just four days earlier, but Edwards was in the field already—determined, as he put it, to make up for lost time. Kane and Grant kept an eye on him, neither of them sure that he could be fully trusted yet.

There was a fourth Cerberus agent in the room, an albino woman called Domi who had been tracking down information about this meeting for several days. She had patched through to Cerberus just a few hours before, confirming the time and location and giving the go-ahead for the others to move in.

The meeting itself was in the West Coast territory of the old United States of America, just forty miles from the majestic settlement of Luikkerville. Built on the ruins of Snakefishville, Luikkerville was a city constructed from faith, its populace enthralled by the preachings of Ullikummis and his followers. News of Ullikummis’s passing had done little to temper that burgeoning faith in the region, and Domi was there to ensure it remained at a manageable level. Where the Annunaki were involved, that was often easier said than done.