God War (17 page)

The figure fell back under the gunfire and the bullets went wild.

Grant blinked in quick succession as he willed the effects of the dazzling headlights away. Before him, the strange humanoid burbled something that sounded like an electronic shriek, before rolling across the deck plating and getting back to its feet. Then it came charging at him again with one of its fellow mechanics waddling after.

Grant ejected the spent cartridge from his Sin Eater as he brought his other arm up to fend off the next attack. He didn’t look directly at the creature this time, instead timing his blows by a combination of sound, instinct and whatever he could make out from the corner of his eye. It wouldn’t do to be dazzled again. Grant sent his Sin Eater back to its hiding place as he fought one-armed against his attacker. His left arm struck against the creature’s chest, knocking it with another angry squawk. Grant felt the thing shift against his blow, stumbling just a little. Closing his eyes, the ex-Mag turned, swinging his whole body as he drove a punch into the creature’s face. The blow struck with a crack of breaking bone, and Grant heard the creature chirrup as it struggled backward. Then there came a shriek, and he knew he’d knocked his first attacker over the side of the bridgelike gangway.

There was no time to stop. The second creature was already coming at him with what appeared to be some kind of power drill. Grant opened his eyes a slit as he heard the drill bit turn with a high-pitched whir. He smacked it aside with his forearm, slamming the shorter figure across its wrist to keep the whirling drill blade away.

A few paces along the wide catwalk, Rosalia twisted aside as another of the strange creatures hurled a tool at her. Nine inches long, the tool whizzed end-over-end through the air as it cut a path toward her. Rosalia turned her head aside, her dark ponytail swishing
behind her as she twisted out of the tossed tool’s path. She watched as it clattered to the decking close to her feet.

Then she sprang up, her feet pounding on the walkway span as she lunged at the creature with her sword. Held almost horizontal, the black sword drove through the air and into the humanoid figure as it tried to jump aside. Too slow, the creature found itself skewered on the end of the sharp blade, falling forward as the tip pierced its torso.

Rosalia turned, wrenching the blade free and dancing in place as she swung it toward her other attacker. The creature batted the blade aside with an outthrust arm, a dusty wad of material tearing free as the metal cut through it.

Then the figure was reaching into one of its capacious pockets, pulling loose a thick cord that it wore at its hip. Six feet in length, the blue cord featured a weight on both ends like a skipping rope, and Rosalia guessed it was used to hook items or levers that were higher than the short creature might be able to reach.

With a flick of the wrist, the rope lashed out, one weighted end hurtling toward Rosalia’s face. She sprang, feet striking the decking with force as she drove her body up and over the flying weight.

The pendulum whizzed back like a yo-yo, zipping away and behind the dwarfen creature as it marveled at Rosalia’s leap. For a split second, Rosalia found herself dazzled by those strange lights that the creature wore around its eyes, and then she was plummeting blindly back to the decking.

The strangely garmented figure seized that moment to strike, whipping the cord at Rosalia’s shapely legs as she struck the deck and yanking sharply back on the cord as it entangled them. Before she could react, Rosalia found herself dragged to the deck, the thick cord caught up in a tangle around her lower legs.

Fifteen feet away, Grant leaped over his combatant’s next drill attack, kicking out with one long leg and striking his attacker hard in the chest. The shorter figure went down in a cloud of dust from its overalls, screaming wildly like a stuck pig. Grant snapped up a handful of the creature’s collar and wrenched it off the deck, at the same time commanding the reloaded Sin Eater into his hand.

Behind Grant, Rosalia grunted as she struck repeatedly against the deck chest-first, the
katana
blade slipping from her grasp and clattering away from her. Behind her, the eerie dwarfen figure was chattering something gleeful, a noise like an excitable fax machine emanating from some orifice in its strange, unearthly face. Grasping the cord with both hands, the creature pulled, dragging the dark-haired mercenary across the deck toward the edge.

Frantically, Rosalia’s hand reached for the Ruger strapped to her hip, pulling it free as she slid across the catwalk toward a sheer drop. Then she had the Ruger P-85 pointed at the chattering abomination as it dragged her to the side of the high-up walkway, squeezing the trigger as the creature fell squarely in her sights.

Three loud reports cut the air, their echoes lost to the churning, whirring sound of the engines below. The creature tugging Rosalia by her feet shrieked, toppling backward as the bullets struck it full in the face. Rosalia watched in grim satisfaction as her attacker fell back over the side of the walkway, stepping into empty space and disappearing from view. Her satisfaction turned to horror as she realized that the thing was still clutching one end of the cord, and suddenly Rosalia found herself being dragged briskly across the deck to the walkway’s edge.

“Magistrate!” she called, as her hands skittered along the smooth walkway, trying desperately to find purchase.

Fifteen feet along the walkway, Grant rattled off a burst of fire into the gut of the last of the creatures from just inches away, ignoring the troll-like beast as it doubled over in pain. He turned at Rosalia’s cry, powering his legs as he chased after her retreating form.

“Go limp!” Grant instructed, shouting to be heard over the cacophonous engines below.

Reading Grant’s lips, Rosalia did as instructed, her legs disappearing over the edge of the walkway, and she felt her stomach sink even as her body began to. Grant sprinted toward her, his long legs eating up the dozen strides it took to reach Rosalia, throwing himself forward with his arms outstretched.

As Rosalia began tipping, Grant’s right hand snagged around her left wrist, and the muscular ex-Mag gritted his teeth as he was dragged toward the walkway’s edge by the momentum. Grant stretched out his left arm, slapping it repeatedly against the hard decking as he tried to bring himself to a halt, the toes of his boots scraping across the bridgelike walkway. Finally Grant stopped, his right arm and shoulder hanging over the side of the catwalk, his hand cinched tightly around Rosalia’s wrist. She swung to and fro, the cord still tangled around her legs as the strange dwarfish creature fell from its end, releasing its own grip. Below, a crowd of the strange, dwarfen workers had begun to form, pointing and shrieking at what was going on above their heads. The figure fell amid them with a bone-sickening crack, but the sound was lost to the whir of the engines.

“Thank you, Magistrate,” Rosalia said breathlessly. “That’s one I owe you.”

“Remind me later,” Grant said, the trace of a smile forming on his lips for a moment.

Then, gritting his teeth with the effort, Grant pulled Rosalia up until she could reach the catwalk’s edge, after which the two of them worked together to get her back on the wide walkway.

“Let’s get going,” Grant said as Rosalia retrieved her sword from amid the mess of crumpled bodies.

“Good idea,” she agreed. “This place is too damn popular for my liking.”

* * *

E
NLIL
LASHED
OUT
with the serpent lightning, the line of light whipping about him in a dizzying display as he charged at the hulking figure of his son. Ullikummis ducked and leaped, deftly avoiding contact with the lightning whip as he powered toward his father.

With a bone-numbing crack, the two foes met beneath the bone arches, their chests crashing together as they drove blow after blow at each other’s heads and torsos.

As the serpent lightning cut the air all around him, mighty Enlil struck out with his free hand, driving the heel of his palm at Ullikummis’s eye. Ullikummis’s head reared back as the blow tried to connect, throwing Enlil’s aim off so that his outthrust hand struck high against his cheek instead. Ullikummis took a single step back, creating distance between the two combatants that seemed alive with blinding white electricity. The serpent lightning crackled and spit, the sounds echoing through the enclosed chamber like the sound of rumbling thunder.

Krak-a-boom!

His scarlet cape billowing around him like a bloody rent in the air, Enlil kicked out with his left leg, a double blow against his own flesh and blood. The first kick struck Ullikummis high in the ribs, smashing against his flank with such force it sounded like a shotgun going off. A split second later, Enlil’s second blow found its mark, crashing behind Ullikummis’s knee and forcing it to bend forward. Ullikummis fell at the blow, lurching forward and dropping to one knee before his father.

Enlil drew the serpent light back and around, describing a rotating arc like the path of a sycamore seed in the wind as it hurtled toward his son’s armored body. As the blinding line of electricity struck, Ullikummis powered himself forward, springing from the decking and driving the top of his head up and into his father’s chin. Enlil’s head whipped back like a skittle in a bowling alley at the blow, even as lightning played across Ullikummis’s form from the whiplike weapon that had wrapped around him.

As Enlil stumbled backward, Ullikummis turned his body, encouraging the cord of lightning to cinch tighter about his form. Fire played across his body, and his father lost his footing, the serpent lightning slipping from his grip. No longer under Enlil’s control, the cord hurtled around Ullikummis’s body like a lit firework, whizzing around and around with a crackling burst of energy and a booming roar of thunder. Ullikummis stood, enduring the serpent lightning as it ran its course, spiraling around his torso in a helter-skelter of unbridled power.

It took five seconds but finally the serpent weapon unlooped from Ullikummis’s stone form, rocketing away from his body and lashing against a wall, its energy spent. It waited there against the floor, twitching like a living thing, dimming and glowing as the energy coursed through it. Ullikummis ignored it.

Enlil lay on the bone deck, his lips pulled back in a grimace, the last vestiges of lightning playing across his teeth. Ullikummis took a step toward him, closing the gap between them, his eight-foot form towering over the fallen figure of his father.

“You had four thousand years to prepare for this,” Ullikummis said.

“An eyeblink to the likes of us,” Enlil dismissed.

Ullikummis shook his head. “Blood calls to blood, the prince succeeds where the king failed. This world is mine now, and I shall gift it to my mother, reborn in the paradise I am building for her. Your reign is at its end, Father. You are a child of the serpent, but you never left the safety of the kindergarten.”

Without warning, Enlil sprang from the floor, striking with the speed of a cobra as he lunged for his son’s face. Momentarily caught off guard, Ullikummis tried to step aside as Enlil hurtled at him, a savage sneer on his lips.

“You have no inkling of where the playpen walls end, child,” Enlil spit contemptuously as his face loomed close to Ullikummis’s. “Nor of who oversees the charges.”

In that instant, Enlil’s eyes met with those of his son and the two of them began their battle anew, shifting the battle to the next plane as their multifaceted forms warred amid the cosmic whirl.

Chapter 13

Engage.

Kane was starting to lose his grip on what was real. Objectively he knew he was sitting in a chair beneath the hidden city of Agartha, and yet trying to square that information with the reality he seemed to be experiencing was becoming harder by the second.

Physically his body was sitting in a navigator’s chair of Annunaki design, a techno-organic symbiote intended to assist in the mapping of pathways through the universe. The Annunaki had come to Earth from the planet Nibiru, traveling across many millions of miles to investigate a new and interesting world on the cusp of childhood. The chair fed the subject with images straight into their brain, bypassing the eyes in favor of the mind’s eye, the same part of the brain utilized in dreaming and imagining. This meant that Kane could theoretically open his eyes and see both the world about him and the incredible relay of images being pumped directly into his brain.

But therein lay another conundrum. Kane had been rapidly losing his sight over the past few weeks, and he had reached a stage where he might be struck temporarily blind for extended periods of time, most especially after the discorporation process of matter transfer involved in a mat-trans jump. The problem had become so pressing that Balam, as a telepath, had felt
compelled to intervene, using a mind link to grant Kane a form of sight that was a few steps removed from what he was used to.

All of which meant that Kane was now sitting in an alien chair, watching imagery being pumped into his brain’s optic nerve while Balam stood nearby, seeing and tapping the same images but only in the role of passive observer.

Kane saw the world opening up in a new and unexpected form, and it reminded him of the thermal-
imaging cameras he had used occasionally during his duties as a Magistrate. Agartha waited around him, but it was a different Agartha from the one he knew, all vibrant colors and tabs and arrows. Kane looked at it, feeling as if he was lucid dreaming, walking the narrow streets with the disconcerting sense that he was floating. He was in the streets above the storeroom, his view most likely centered on the approximate position of the astrogator’s chair. It was overwhelming, real and yet unreal.

“Stay focused, Kane,” Balam instructed from somewhere nearby.

Automatically Kane turned, searching for the speaker of those words where he should be at his shoulder. Balam was not there, and Kane realized he was not surprised. This was a virtual world, or maybe a living photograph, like the kind of live video feed that Cerberus utilized to monitor planet Earth.

As he turned, Kane saw a new range of options open up before him, data hurtling across his vision in gaudy, floating panes of information that tagged everything he saw. Kane could not read the language that was written there, floating in the air like a glass slide, and when he stared at it, the image itself changed, zooming in on the building it had tagged or flipping through a dozen separate still images that somehow related to what he had been peering at.

The information was branching, Kane realized, bringing layer upon layer of new detail for every item he looked at. When it came to charting distant stars, Kane guessed, like earthlings, the Annunaki would need to know what dangers the territory might bring. Could they breathe there? Were there predators? The astrogation chair was like a living encyclopedia, cramming megabytes of information into every inch of space.

Focus is right, Kane told himself. A man could soon get overwhelmed by the oodles of irrelevant detail he was being bombarded with here.

He drew a steadying breath, marveling at the way the image of the streets seemed to roll with the movement of his chest despite the obvious fact he was not actually standing there.

As he breathed out, something else came over Kane’s vision, more windows of information hanging in front of his eyes, branching even as he acknowledged them, more panels and tabs opening with every twitch of his eyes. The astrogator’s chair was working out the content of his breath, breaking it down into the component parts and relaying information about each one back to him from its capacious databanks.

“Okay,” Kane said, speaking the word aloud in an effort to help ground himself. “Let’s just take this slow, think it through.”

He was viewing a datastream, plunged deep into a cacophony of disordered information that he needed to sort through to get to what he wanted—Brigid Baptiste’s location. It was, ironically, the kind of task Brigid was ideally suited to with her archivist background and her eidetic memory. But if she had been here, none of this would have been necessary.

The flow of data pulsed before Kane, adding an extra dimension to everything he looked at. And he stood there—if it could even be called standing—watching as the explosion of data expanded across his mind’s eye.

No, Kane reminded himself. He was not watching; he was guiding. He could control the imagery, instructing it to do his bidding, to follow his will. He was here to find Brigid, nothing more than that. It was Kane who decided what to look at within this strange new map—no one else.

With a determined grunt, Kane commanded the chair to seek her out.

* * *

L
AKESH
STOOD
AMID
THE
wreckage of the control room speaking to Donald Bry while Reba DeFore bandaged the latter’s wounds. Bry looked more disheveled than ever, with his copper hair in disarray and a bloody smear running down the side of his face. However, despite some superficial cuts and being a little shaken up, he was fine.

“The computers took several knocks,” Bry was explaining, “but I think we can salvage something.”

Lakesh looked at a wrecked terminal. A stone projectile had smashed through it during their battle with the hooded intruders, and both screen and keyboard had been ruined beyond repair. “What about our communications?” he asked.

Over by one wall, Brewster Philboyd was kneeling before another terminal, running through a reboot sequence to bring the computer unit back to life.

“Just bringing them back online now,” Brewster explained. “Booting up okay. We’ll be at the moment of truth in about ninety seconds.” Brewster’s lanky frame looked uncomfortable working from the floor like this, but both of the room’s swivel chairs had lost casters during the scuffle.

At that moment, Domi paced back into the room, shaking her head, with Shizuka trotting along behind her. Domi had been on an errand to assess the rest of Shizuka’s lodge while DeFore was patching up Lakesh’s wounds prior to turning her attention to Donald Bry.

“My love?” Lakesh prompted as he saw her enter.

Domi offered him a haunted look. “Hell of a mess,” she stated regretfully.

Lakesh nodded. Domi’s conclusions were pretty much what he had expected.

“My men have secured the lodge,” Shizuka added, “and they are now surveying the local area. So long as you don’t object to the smell of smoke, we should be safe for now.”

“Yes,” Lakesh acknowledged, “but how long will that last?”

Shizuka said nothing, but her expression showed her concern. The lodge could not be protected for long, as she had neither the manpower nor the armament to hold up a force of determined individuals like Ullikummis’s firewalkers. Back in New Edo, her own people were stretched to the breaking point defending against similar infiltrators.

Bry smiled curtly as DeFore finished cleaning the wound on his forehead. “We could move the whole operation again, Lakesh,” he suggested. “Not impossible—we’ve proved that now.”

“Yes,” Lakesh mused, absentmindedly stroking his fingers across his chin, “but where would we go, Donald? We are running out of safe places to hide.”

“Shouldn’t be hiding anyway,” Domi spit, venom in her voice.

“Now, my dearest one,” Lakesh chastised gently, “we must respond to our circumstances or, as the old phrase had it, needs must when the devil drives.”

“So?” Domi replied. “Drive out devil.”

“Easier said than done, I’m afraid,” Lakesh admitted.

Brewster spoke up once more from his position by the wall. “Communications are back online. We’re live if you want us to be.”

Lakesh looked thoughtful for a moment, gazing out through the shattered glass of the French doors and into the delicately tended garden, so incongruous in this battle zone. “Pass me a headset,” he ordered, “and patch me through to Kane. On speaker, if you will.”

* * *

H
IS
MIND
FED
by the astrogator’s chair, Kane hurtled across the planet in a rush of blurred sensation. The sun swelled like a great fiery disk in the sky while beneath him the ground seemed to have become a series of straight lines, stacked atop one another like the child’s game of pickup sticks. It was a representation of reality, he knew, and yet it felt real to his brain, feeding all of his senses in new and unheard-of ways, making everything novel.

This must be how a baby sees the world, Kane thought. Everything was arrayed before him to be interpreted for the very first time.

He had commanded the chair to locate Brigid Baptiste, but despite the movement he felt no pull. He was flying over a racing panorama, and yet it was nothing like flying. It was like stepping through a waterfall, the water lashing at his body with detail and information, droplets swelling with data he would never have enough time to absorb. Beneath his feet, the ground seemed to swell like the waves of the ocean, an illusion of movement with no physical sense involved. The dichotomy of the two conflicting messages made Kane feel nauseous, and he probed with his tongue, feeling as if that organ was enlarging to fill his mouth. The sense of nonmovement was alien to Kane, confusing his senses the way the early motion pictures had confused their viewers, making them flee in terror as a photographed steam train seemed to hurtle toward them.

The chair was geared to alien senses—those of the Annunaki—and it took some getting used to.

If the chair was locating Brigid, then it was doing so with no sense feeding back to Kane, no noticeable tug. It simply did, without coloring its actions with emotion. And that, too, felt alien to Kane, and it took him a moment to realize why. The navigator’s chair was inside his head, running information directly into his brain, and to have information delivered in that way, with no opinion, no interpretation, was inhuman.

Suddenly, a voice blurted in his head, so loud Kane was startled.

“Kane, do you read?”

It was Lakesh, but for a moment Kane couldn’t make sense of it. It took him two seconds to realize the voice was not a part of the navigation chair software but was his Commtact springing back to life.

“Lakesh,” Kane replied, engaging his Commtact, “what’s happening?”

“We’ve had something of an upset here, my friend,” Lakesh explained, “but nothing we can’t handle. Wondering how your search is going.”

“I’m using a...tracking device to locate Baptiste,” Kane stated.

“Her transponder’s still not operational,” Lakesh reasoned.

“Different tech,” Kane summarized. “Annunaki lost and found, something Balam had in storage down in Agartha.” As he spoke, the world before Kane’s senses hurtled in a rush of color and shape, morphing and blurring as he hurtled toward his destination. Already he was learning to look past it, ignoring the mad paint splatter of once-familiar views. “Takes the wind out of you, though.”

As Kane raced across borders drawn in reds and purples and sapphire, his mind expanding far beyond anything he could accurately describe, he saw a sparkling before him like the blinking of an eye. The sparkling was lightning bright, like the twinkling of a star. He gazed at it, feeling a mixture of wonder and confusion, and as he did so his body seemed to be thrust closer, and as it was, the world about him took on familiar shapes and contours once more, solidifying as if it were something that had previously been hidden behind a gossamer-thin curtain.

Kane stopped, the lines solidifying all about him, the strange star glistening in place. In a moment, he was upon it, and he saw what it was.

“Baptiste...” he breathed, the word coming out as nothing more than a whisper.

Brigid Baptiste stood before him, as beautiful as ever, her slender body sheathed in the black leather suit that fitted like a glove, her fire-red hair bursting from her skull like a nuclear explosion. She scowled, and Kane saw dark lines streaked across her face, covering her eyes and darkening her lips. She appeared utterly unaware of his presence, even though he seemed to be standing no more than a foot from her face.

“My
anam-chara,
” Kane said as he gazed into Brigid’s emerald eyes. “My soul friend.”

“Kane?” It was Lakesh’s voice once more, searing into his thoughts like acid. “What’s happening there?”

“I’ve found Baptiste,” Kane explained. As he did so, his sense of euphoria passed and he started to take in the surroundings properly for the first time. They came into view like a camera pulling focus, blurring into abrupt sharpness.

Brigid Baptiste was standing in a midsize room with sloping walls and a pool of swirling liquid that dominated its center. The liquid was milky-white and its surface glistened despite the chamber’s dimmed, purple lighting. The pool’s surface was at the same level as the floor, and Kane assumed it was some kind of pit that dominated the room.

Within the pool, placed directly in its center, stood a wide stone structure a little shorter than Brigid herself. Kane recognized the structure, or at least its ilk—it was the same as the stone egg he had found in the fortress Bensalem, where he and Balam had come across the twisted genetic copy of Little Quav.

Lakesh spoke again, his voice intruding on Kane’s thoughts. “Kane, where are you?”

It took a moment for Kane to frame his response. “A simulation... I’m not sure,” he admitted.

The simulation moved in real time, and yet as Kane looked at it he saw it was imperfect, a blur to the movements, a fractured nature to the areas he was not directly examining.

“I’ll pull back,” he said after a moment, trusting the Commtact to transmit his words over the thousands of miles between himself, his body and Lakesh.