God War (11 page)

They leaped from the edge of the roof and onto the next, this one just eighteen inches from their launch point where the structures of the city bent inward against one another, vying for space like teeth in a crooked jaw.

While the massing army crowded the twisty-turny streets far behind them, Grant and Rosalia made good progress. Despite a couple of missteps, the two Cerberus rebels found themselves close to the city center in a little over ten minutes. They stood atop a two-story structure, its walls bone-white like everything else around them. The sun had risen, and the brightness of the bone-cobbled streets and buildings was dazzling. There, just two blocks ahead, loomed the great saurian body of the dragon, its head thrust toward the heavens with the inscrutable lizard smile formed along the line of its pressed lips.

“Once we pass her, we can exit town to the north,” Rosalia said, but Grant was thinking about other strategies.

Grant looked at
Tiamat
up close once more, his head reeling to take in the immensity of her body. This was a space vehicle that served as a city, and its head alone would have covered a city block.

They had come toward
Tiamat
via a somewhat circuitous route, and they now stood closer to its left rump than they had previously. Standing beside Grant on the bone rooftop catching her breath, Rosalia eyed the body of the dragon with awe. The scales of its flesh were dark as if smoke-damaged, the color lost to the shadows cast by the morning sun. There were lights within the structure, glistening in the shadows like pinprick stars, their true size lost amid the grandeur of the dragon form itself.

“She’s kind of beautiful, I guess,” Rosalia admitted.

“Yeah,” Grant agreed. “
Tiamat.
Mother of the gods.”

Tiamat
’s skin was mottled, and as their eyes adjusted to the darkness of the shadows Grant and Rosalia began to notice where that skin was damaged, great rents in the flesh where it had spoiled like an overripe fruit.
Tiamat
had not been fully formed when they had mounted their attack the previous night, and the damage they had caused—despite being relatively minor—had spread through the structure, ripping away great hunks of her flesh.

The last time, they had gained entry via a series of explosive charges strapped to the spaceship’s hull, carving a small hole just big enough to allow a person entry, but that hole was a quarter turnaround from where they were now, Grant guessed, and on a structure the size of
Tiamat
it would take some time to find it again.

As Grant pondered this, Rosalia pointed to something at the very rear of the structure, beneath the base of its huge tail.

“Magistrate, look.”

Grant saw a straight line of light forming there, and as he watched the line became a rectangle, moving downward as it increased in size. A door was opening there, he realized, colossal in size and wide enough to allow thirty Sandcats to drive into it abreast. An easy way in or out.

“This ain’t good,” Grant muttered.

Then he stopped, the words turning to ashes in his mouth. Within that huge line of light, Grant and Rosalia could see humanoid figures, backlit shadows that waited in line at the edge of the hangar door. Despite the harsh light streaming from behind them, Grant recognized their silhouettes.

“We have a new problem,” Grant stated.

They were Annunaki—hundreds of them.

Chapter 7

Brewster Philboyd hadn’t been kidding when he had told Kudo that he might be the one who came to collect him from the field. Right now the gangly limbed astrophysicist was hurrying across the carefully manicured lawn that surrounded the south stretch of Shizuka’s coastal property that he and his team had taken over as their temporary headquarters, making his way to the spot that served as a parallax point. The lanky scientist carried a metallic attaché case in one hand, swinging it to and fro as he rushed across the green lawn. The case contained an interphaser unit, one of two currently in use by the Cerberus personnel. Grant’s team had gone into the field via a different method, leaving Cerberus with both units until Kane took one to respond to Balam’s call.

Several hundred yards from the back windows of the temporary ops room, Brewster halted, checking the area he now stood in.

“Are you in place yet, Brewster?” Donald Bry asked via their linked Commtacts.

Brewster gazed around at the largely unremarkable stretch of lawn. Over to one side he could see the simple wooden fence that ran along the cliff’s edge like a farmyard gate, beyond which was a sheer drop into the Pacific Ocean. “I believe so,” he stated into his throat mike.

“Domi’s showing at about a quarter mile from the pickup point and moving fast,” Donald informed him, relaying the information he saw on screen just a few hundred yards away.

Brewster nodded. “Check.” He was busy now, working at the locks of the bulky attaché case and pulling the triangular interphaser unit free from its protective housing. In a few seconds Brewster had the unit set up on the ground, the case closed and locked beside it. His fingers briskly tapped out a sequence of information on the flip-down control panel at the interphaser’s base, waiting while the interphaser went through its self-diagnosis.

There was nothing to distinguish this part of the lawn from any other, other than perhaps the fact that the grass looked a little patchy where people had walked across it, like the baseline of a grass tennis court. The interphaser required a parallax point to operate, but these came in many different forms. Frequently, parallax points were centers of worship or held great religious significance, but so much information had been lost that it was quite possible that any sign of a point’s existence had become buried under centuries of changing terrain. Whatever this point had originally looked like, it was now just another strip of the neatly manicured lawn of Shizuka’s property. The nukecaust had affected the old California coast, which meant that this coastal property had probably been much farther inland a few hundred years before, just another grand estate in the Hollywood hills.

As he thought on that, the interphaser came to life and Brewster stepped back as the eerily beautiful flower of energy opened up before his eyes, twin cones of churning color lunging above and—impossibly—below where the interphaser waited. In another second, the quantum gateway was open, joining this space to one thousands of miles away in the midst of old Iraq. Brewster girded himself before stepping through, feeling that discomforting sense of nonmovement wash over him in a surging rush.

* * *

“I
MPOSSIBLE
,” R
OSALIA
spit as she watched the lizardlike Annunaki forms step from the lit rear doors of the dragon ship
Tiamat.

Crouched beside her on the rooftop, Grant didn’t bother to answer.

“The ship was falling apart...” Rosalia continued, doing nothing to disguise the irritation in her voice.

“It still is,” Grant told her in a monotone.

Rosalia looked to where he indicated, saw the blotches of discolored—what was it, flesh, skin?—that showed all along the hull where there had not been any before.

“Those creatures are being controlled by something,” Rosalia said, turning her attention back to the hundred or so Annunaki who were now swarming from the lowered deck plate that formed the back of the door. “I don’t know what it is, Grant, but it came out of my dog. I—” she shook her head, trying to vocalize something at the very farthest reaches of plausibility “— felt it.”

“I don’t think they’re friendly,” Grant said.

“They saved us before. Saved you,” Rosalia reminded him.

“No, they didn’t.” Grant shook his head. “They wanted Enlil—they made that pretty darn clear. We just happened to be along for the ride. Once they had what they wanted, they dismissed us from their thoughts. My guess is that now they’ve dealt with the big bad, they’ll come after anything and anyone who gets in their way.”

“You’re speculating,” Rosalia cautioned him.

“We need to get inside the ship,” Grant announced, ignoring her complaints. “Now more than ever, we need to shut this baby down once and for all. Before Ullikummis gets there or these reborn things strip the ship of whatever it is they want.”

* * *

L
OCKED
INSIDE
THE
A
NNUNAKI
bodies, the Igigi felt joyous as they hurried into the bone streets of the dragon. For more than three thousand years, they had been locked in a prison of their own devising, their memories trapped in the corrupted shadow box. Now they had bodies once again, the powerful bodies of the Annunaki, and they reveled in their use.

That they served Enlil, the mightiest and cruelest of Annunaki royalty, seemed only fitting; they had served him in their first life, when they had been “those who watch and see,” organizing the world to his requirements and enforcing his will. To serve the Annunaki was an honor, and it was all that the Igigi had ever wanted, all that they had lived for. Their quest of rebellion, three-and-a-half millennia ago, was but a momentary lapse in a race of creatures bred only for servitude.

Now more than one hundred of them flooded out of the hull doors of the starship
Tiamat,
rushing into the maze of streets beyond. Their Annunaki bodies were powerful, perfect specimens of the grace and superiority of their masters in all things. To wear those flesh suits was an honor like no other, and each Igigi gloried in what he or she had become.

Around them, the bone-white buildings glimmered beneath the morning sun, a swathe of alabaster that seemed to stand as a monument to the might and wonderment of the Annunaki, like the old cities of Eridu and Nippur and Babylon that had sat on this very soil just a few thousand years before. The Annunaki forms hurried through the streets, their pace never slacking, things of beauty carved of flesh and scale and life. Ullikummis’s army had entered from the east, and they, too, dashed through the streets, their numbers more than three thousand now and swelling with each pulse of the interphase window on the banks of the Euphrates. That these two forces would meet—one of one hundred or so, the other outnumbering them by thirty to one—was inevitable. The first clashes occurred less than a mile and a half from the center, where
Tiamat
’s body basked in the sunshine.

The human army turned another corner in the twisted streets and came face-to-face with three Annunaki. There were almost two dozen in the human party, and though they were armed with simple weapons, they felt confident that they could overpower these few humanoid creatures whose scales shimmered in the light.

“Kill them!” shouted the lead human, a man in his late twenties with a swish of black hair that was going prematurely gray at the temples.

His name was Davies and he had once lived a refined life in the towering city of Beausoleil out in the western territory of the old United States of America. His life had been devoted to engineering—he had helped perfect one of the processes used to externally coat the walls of Beausoleil. Davies had been overseeing a project to find a more durable roofing design for some of the towers on Alpha Level when the air raid had struck, mercilessly destroying whole chunks of the ville that had stood for almost a century against all intrusion, a monument to man’s reborn desire for civilization under the auspices of the Program of Unification.

Davies had lost his home and his wife when the bombs struck, watched through the windows of his office as dark smoke poured from the residential building he had lived in. He had been lucky to survive; in the highly organized microcosm of society that was Beausoleil, Davies had done something almost unthinkable that morning—he had gone into work early, better to address the roofing issue that had concerned the buildings along the east walls of the ville. It had been that dedication to his duty that had allowed Davies to survive, while the very buildings he had planned to reroof had been destroyed in the blink of an eye as the bombing raid leveled whole chunks of the settlement.

In that day, Davies had lost his family, his home and his ville. Escaping the crumbling ville as smoke billowed from its ruins, Davies had found himself adrift. He had never ventured outside the ville’s protective walls, had never had cause to consider life as an outlander. For a while he wandered the vast territory that had belonged to Baroness Beausoleil, searching for food and shelter and a way to live. He had fallen in with a group of nomadic farmers who bred goats. They had taken him in, teaching him to be strong, to rear the disagreeable and pugnacious animals. He was damaged inside, his spirits at their lowest ebb, but Davies understood work and so he threw himself into this new task, rearing goats as the tribe moved from one location to the next. He often stopped to cock his head as he went about his business, imagining he heard his wife’s voice calling him to share some idle observation, only to discover it was just his imagination, a ghost on the wind.

Like so many of the ville dwellers who had lost their homes, Davies had been a man cast spiritually adrift. The new church had arrived at an ideal time, with its promise of utopia, of Heaven on Earth. Beausoleil was just one of several villes that had been left in ruins across the great continent of North America, and the outflow of survivors and refugees was colossal. Ullikummis could not have chosen a better time to begin his religion with its promise of a better tomorrow; a whole segment of the population had become desperate to hear that very message. Davies was one of them, and he had joined the congregation in its raggedy meeting room in a spit of a town on the outskirts of Beausoleil’s territory. He had recognized other people there from his years in the ville, though they looked thinner now, and many of the men had grown beards. Each day the congregation grew, and all that the minister demanded in return was the pledge to a better world. “Our love is stone,” he had said, “and a stone can never be destroyed.” The message had appealed to Davies more than most, for he had worked with stone in his ville life, knew its properties and limitations, appreciated the strength it represented.

Now Davies found himself at the forefront of a swiftly formed platoon of crusaders come to fight in the name of their god. He had not heard the call when it had come, but the minister had; the stone was embedded inside
him
and he could always hear the drums if he listened, while Davies, like many others in his congregation, remained a simple advocate, trusting the stone-blessed minister to instruct them in god’s will. Thus, when the call had come, Davies had stepped through the quantum gateway with willing fervor, joining the others in his congregation as they stepped forth to fight in the war of gods.

Armed with a simple strut of wood pulled from the wreckage of a woodworm-ridden door destined for scrap, Davies lunged for the first of the Annunaki—an eight-foot-tall figure who dwarfed his own five-foot-seven frame. The length of wood cut through the air, arcing toward the powerfully muscled torso of the Annunaki warrior. With dazzling speed, the Annunaki’s left arm jabbed out, swatting the hunk of wood aside before it could strike his naked purple-blue body. Davies had no time to react; already the Annunaki’s other arm was up, striking him across the jaw in an open-palmed slap. Davies tumbled backward, stars bursting across his vision with the force of the blow.

Behind him, Davies’s colleagues were rushing at the Annunaki trio, and one of them stepped on the dark-haired man’s fingers as he fell to the ground. The lead Annunaki, the one with a shimmer of purple-blue scales and a spiny crest running the length of his scalp, swatted at the next human, knocking the man so hard he went careening into a bone wall.

There was barely any room to maneuver in this alleylike pathway. Far from being helpless, the three Annunaki were like a battering ram, a solid wall that hurtled into the human soldiers without any hesitation, let alone mercy. They fought for their master, the god Enlil; to back away would be heresy.

Human bodies fell backward, tossed against walls and ground, one thrown so high he slapped into the edge of a second-story roof, snapping his spine as his fragile body folded with the impact. The Annunaki drove onward, smashing aside two or three humans at a time, each one as powerful as a whole squadron of men. Twenty-four men fell in as many seconds to just those three Annunaki, and their lizard brothers were exacting a similar toll as they charged to meet the intruders to Enlil’s majestic starcraft.

One of the humans, a brutal man called Thomersen who had a history of violence, ran at the Annunaki devils with a meat cleaver in his hand. Unlike the soft ville-raised people who had joined his congregation, Thomersen had been raised in the Outlands, and he knew how to take care of himself. When the call had come, he had picked up the first weapon he could find before entering the swirling portal that cut through space. He had used the meat cleaver the night before to carve up one of the goats his tribe raised for slaughter.

Thomersen’s cleaver swished through the air as he ran at an orange-scaled Annunaki. Unarmed, the Annunaki held one arm up protectively and shrieked as the razor-edged blade sliced a line across his forearm from wrist to elbow, a great gob of flesh falling away in bloody slop. Thomersen smiled sadistically, eyeing the foul alien, little comprehending that it was of the very same species as the stone god he stood for.

In a blur of sunset-orange scales, the Annunaki spun on a heel, bringing one powerful leg out in a sweep and knocking the grinning apekin away in a flail of limbs.