God War (10 page)

And now he brought true war to his father, Overlord Enlil. Now he came with one hundred thousand troops whom he had recruited or had recruited for him over the period since he had returned to Earth after his hasty exile on his father’s command.

His father had genetically altered his child, Ullikummis, into this weapon, a living creature of stone who could strike down other Annunaki gods who threatened his reign. But when the attempted assassination of Teshub, who then held the key codes to
Tiamat
’s operational protocols, had failed, Enlil had banished Ullikummis forever, expelling him into space inside a prison of the strongest stone. Ullikummis had accepted his father’s punishment, knowing all along that he was the scapegoat in his father’s scheme, described as a rogue and used to disguise Enlil’s hand in the audacious power struggle.

Ullikummis’s mother—who had borne him after Enlil had raped her, taking her as his own as much through necessity as lust—had remained quiet throughout, but she had promised to help her son. It was through her machinations that the orbit of the meteor prison that held him had been altered just enough that he would eventually return to Earth, the planet where he had been born and raised. Ullikummis had spent four millennia trapped in a tiny, rock-walled cell in orbit through the solar system, and he had repeated just one single word throughout his long journey: “Enlil.” It was the name of his father, the single object of his hate.

But when Ullikummis had arrived back on Earth he had found a planet much changed from the one he remembered. The Annunaki no longer ruled; in fact, their most recent bid for world domination had ended in the destruction of the
Tiamat
and the seeming end to their mighty, eternal feud. Even Enlil, Ullikummis’s father, had gone to ground, hiding from the very apekin he should by all rights rule. The display had sickened Ullikummis.

Through touching the Ontic Library, the sentient database of all knowledge, Ullikummis had discovered his father’s whereabouts and learned how the Cerberus people had repelled him in his quest to rule the apekin once more, slapping him down as if they did not accept their place in the natural order. Apekin, as foolish and passionate as ever. Ullikummis would deal with them, too, in time.

While he was in the Ontic Library, Ullikummis had learned of something else, too: that
Tiamat
yet lived, reborn from her own ouroboros seed.

Now he trekked toward the product of that seed with his army in tow, ready to wage battle with his father, to engage in the god war.

To believe that the conflicts of the Annunaki were waged purely on the physical realm, with an exchange of punches or the blast of a lightning weapon, was to misunderstand the nature of the Annunaki. Ullikummis had explained it once to Brigid, when he had set about converting her prodigious mind to his cause. “They started their current cycle as hybrids, half human, half advanced DNA,” he had told her. “The human part clings, holding them back. If you saw the true battles between the gods, if you had witnessed the ways they fought across the planes millennia ago, you would never even recognize the creatures you fought as the Annunaki—you would think them a joke.”

Now Ullikummis and Brigid strode into the colossal structure of
Tiamat
’s wings, surrounded by a throng of his loyal troopers, the hybrid girl Quav at Brigid’s side. Ullikummis had once described the Annunaki creatures she had seen before as nothing more than actors on a stage, dressed in masks and rubber suits, humans in everything but appearance. Now, for the first time in her life, Brigid would witness a true battle between Annunaki space gods. Ullikummis had explained the Annunaki to her as “beautiful beings, multifaceted, crossing dimensions you cannot begin to comprehend.” Their wars, he explained, were fought on many planes at once, the rules of their games intersecting only tangentially with Earth and its holding pen of stars. What she had seen was only a sliver of what the battle was, and to his mind, the Annunaki had shamed themselves in portraying it thus.

Ahead of them, the swanlike neck of the grounded
Tiamat
waited, her red eyes glistening in the sunlight like rubies. She was sleeping—Ullikummis could tell that even from this distance. Dozing as she waited for the battle to commence.

* * *

R
OSALIA
PEERED
over the rooftop as the dozen faithful troops spied her and Grant. They were dressed in different manners, three of them in the infamous robes that looked like a monk’s habit with the red shield over their breast in imitation of the old Magistrate uniform.

“Unfaithful!” one of the robed figures shrieked.

“Nonbeliever!” another cried as his hooded eyes spotted Grant on the rooftop.

As one, the robed soldiers reached for the leather pouches they wore tied to their simple belts, pulling out a handful of tiny, sharp stones, each no bigger than a bullet. From their other hands, a slingshot had appeared from its hiding place in their simple raiment, and they brought the ammunition to the weapon in a swift, well-oiled gesture that seemed to be second nature.

Rosalia ducked back, her arm up to warn Grant away as the robed warriors launched their first volley. The tiny stones struck with such force that they chipped the bone that made up the structure, sending hard flecks of it up into the air with loud pops.

“Come on, Magistrate,” Rosalia urged, running to the far side of the building, “it’s time we blew this party.”

Grant didn’t need telling twice. He was already halfway across the rooftop, looking for an escape route that didn’t lead to the street where the warriors were waiting. “Head up,” Grant instructed. “Keep to the high ground.”

Assenting to Grant’s suggestion, Rosalia sprinted across the roof while behind her she heard the rattle of more stones peppering the building’s walls. As she reached the edge of the rooftop, Rosalia flung herself forward, kicking off with her back foot and springing higher into the air, throwing her hands forward. With a grunt of expelled breath, she struck the next roof over with her body, clambering up and over its chalk-colored lip in a couple of seconds and scurrying onward even as Grant leaped to join her.

“They sense we’re different,” Rosalia stated as she led the way across the next roof, this one several feet higher than the first.

“Then we’re kind of screwed,” Grant said as he returned his Sin Eater to its hidden holster. They were hurrying across the rooftops in parkour style, and he needed both hands if he was to keep up with the ferocious pace set by his beautiful companion. “It’s too late to convert, I guess.”

“No,” Rosalia said as she bounded from one rooftop to the next, making her way gradually back into the heart of the city. “Just get some ground between us for now. I have an idea.”

“Care to share it with the class?” Grant asked, irritated by the woman’s cryptic nature.

Rosalia’s dark eyes flashed as she glanced back at Grant. “Just keep up,” she said, and Grant watched as her trim figure launched across the gap between buildings, twirling through the air like a sycamore seed and allowing her to change direction as she landed.

The forming mob was long behind them, all but forgotten already. Even so, Grant couldn’t shake the feeling that they were trying to outrun the crest of a tidal wave.

* * *

A
BOARD
THE
DRAGON
SHIP
,
Tiamat,
Enlil stood in the control room, studying the glasslike diagnostics displays as they filtered across the air, streaming into and through one another like so much smoke.
Tiamat
had been wounded in the conflict with the Cerberus people, and there had been significant damage to her water tanks which, in turn, had caused peripheral damage elsewhere. The ship was not full grown and, Enlil thought regretfully, he had perhaps been hasty in executing his plan to capture humans and work their primitive DNA into something suitable for use by the Annunaki.

Enlil held a palm computer in his clawed hand, mentally linked to his brain so that he could send commands to
Tiamat
at the speed of thought. Now he squeezed the device, which looked something like a seashell with a split center.
Tiamat
responded to that squeeze, adding a secondary layer of information across his yellow eyes with the vertical, black-slit pupils. She was hurt and her body was deteriorating. She had within her the power to regenerate, but she could not tap it. Something was obstructing her functionality, something relating to the damage she had sustained the night before.

Enlil cursed as another lightning strike rattled the mighty ship from the abandoned birthing chamber. The machinery there was going haywire thanks to the combined efforts of several Cerberus operatives. Damn them—did they have to insist on interfering in his plans time and again?

As Enlil studied the internal diagnostics, an alert flashed across one of the mistlike displays that hung in the air like smoke rings. He studied it for a moment, trying to make sense of the information being relayed to him. There were people outside, an army of apekin, hurrying through the dead corpuscles of
Tiamat
’s dry wings. Could this be Cerberus once more, sending a thousand or more of their people to attack him? Did they
have
a thousand people?

But there was something else in the display that caught Enlil’s eye, and he enlarged the image so as better to study it. Another Annunaki was out there, heading toward the heart of
Tiamat
among the apekin throng. The mother ship had detected his presence immediately, identified him as one of her children.

Enlil studied the scan for a long moment, taking in the information it provided about that genetically altered Annunaki. Not Marduk, then, or Overlord Zu. Another, one who had altered his perfect Annunaki body for reasons that Enlil could not begin to guess. And then the realization struck him as the monitors droned on, pulling up a graphic representation of that Annunaki stranger who hurried toward Enlil’s lair.

“Ullikummis,” Enlil muttered, the words lost in the sharp intake of his breath. “So, you have returned, my son.”

It should have been impossible, Enlil knew. He had expelled the child into space, sent him to float among the stars for the duration of his near-endless life. And yet, here he stood on Earth once again and with an army of apekin at his beck and call.

But Enlil did not question the facts presented to him. Ullikummis had beaten the odds and returned, and that was only right because he was his son—and what would any son of Enlil be if he could not defy the odds?

Tapping a quick sequence out on the palm link to
Tiamat,
Enlil called forth the Igigi who hid within the shells of the reborn Annunaki. “We still have much to do,” he spoke to the empty room as if reminding himself. “More than I conceived. Let us begin.”

Tiamat
trembled as her mighty cargo doors opened for the very first time.

* * *

T
HE
SOUNDS
OF
THE
MOB
were behind them now, their distant echoes like a half-remembered dream. Grant and Rosalia made their way through the citylike structure of the grounded spaceship via rooftops, leaping from one level to the next, turning back only occasionally when they ran out of routes. Rosalia had a natural talent for this, Grant noticed, and—not for the first time—he wondered momentarily about the mysterious young woman’s background. Her movements and abilities spoke of long hours of training via repetition, and she seemed competent in a great many disciplines. Perhaps, he thought, her training mirrored a Magistrate’s. Perhaps she was an ex-Magistrate herself.

Grant and Rosalia had traveled through this so-called city once before, just a half day earlier. It had taken time to navigate the labyrinthine roads then, constantly meeting dead ends as the streets snaked back on themselves like rats’ tails. The rooftops proved a far quicker way across the settlement, something Grant had not considered before, having assumed—incorrectly as it transpired—that the structures were inhabited.

They stopped at one point on the roof of a three-story structure, now far distant from the burgeoning hordes of Ullikummis’s army. Rosalia stood bent over, palms on her knees as she sucked in great breaths through her open mouth.

“You okay?” Grant asked.

From her bent position, Rosalia glanced up and gave a fixed smile. “Little run...never hurt anyone,” she said between breaths. Grant watched as her slender shoulders heaved.

His own cardiovascular system was burning with effort, but Grant steadied his breathing and watched the far distance, searching for the city limits. Prongs of dark stone had appeared there, like thick lines of ink amid the whiteness of the spaceship’s bone structures. Ullikummis was bringing them, just as he had guessed, tearing up the streets as he set his markers, each one blocking off yet another route of the mazelike city.

With casual indifference, Grant recalled the Sin Eater to his hand once again, then checked it over with studied professionalism. He emptied the dead magazine in its stock, reloading with a fresh magazine from his belt before sending it back to its hiding place in his sleeve. He was running low on ammo now—best be careful how he used it.

When he turned back he saw Rosalia looking at him. No, not at him—past him. Grant turned to peer behind him, saw what it was that had caught her eye. Another needle of dark stone was wending its way into the sky like a single nail, emerging between the chalk-white buildings perhaps a quarter-mile away, scraping against their walls.

“He’s moving in,” Rosalia said.

“Yeah,” Grant agreed. “Adding a few personal touches, I guess, to make the place seem more homey.”

They continued on, heading toward their goal of the dragon’s torso at the center of the weird settlement. Grant led the way, picking up speed as he hurried across the rooftops, and he was gratified to see Rosalia keeping pace with him. Her endurance was exceptional, and he had never once heard her complain.