Cradle Of Destiny

“No!” Shizuka yelled. Some instinct told her that if that last bit of Grant disappeared behind the wall, he would be gone, for no tether could resist the pull of currents across a dimension she couldn’t comprehend.

Suddenly, as if hurled by a tornado, Shizuka was free from the vortex. She collapsed to the floor of the chamber. She’d been birthed from seeming nothingness, her molecules yanked apart like taffy as she was drawn through a hole. If she hadn’t been one of the most physically fit people in New Edo, she’d be suffering a heart attack.

Instead, her heart broke as she knew that she was safe in the time she belonged, while Grant was gone, on the other side of the temporal event horizon. She looked and saw only an empty floor as the plates powered down, the shorn electrical cable that was Grant’s tether lying mockingly beside her.

“Damn it, Grant…”

Chapter 5

Never before had Shamhat been struck so soundly, even by Humbaba, his half-Annunaki master. The Igigi staggered back to his feet, wiping the ichor from the corner of his mouth, smearing it across his reptilian scales. Four mindless Nephilim drones struggled against the human who had appeared in their midst in the court of Urudug.

“He is human, is he not?” Humbaba asked. “He’s large, even for the Africans we know as the Watusi.”

“Nearly the size of an Annunaki,” Shamhat said. “Much larger than we, your servants.”

Humbaba’s leonine head rose and fell in a slow acknowledging nod. “Human, yet he wears garments not of the people we idle among.”

Shamhat’s yellow eyes narrowed to slits. “Chemically processed polymers blended beneath a biologically refined shell for his cloak. Interwoven plant-based fabrics with metal and synthetic additions for the vestments on his trunk and limbs. His footwear—”

“I noticed their uniqueness, Shamhat. Do not bore me with the fashion critique,” Humbaba’s lion voice grumbled. “If I’m not mistaken, the creature also possesses two chemical-powered, repeating projectile weapons. Such technology shouldn’t exist on this backwater world for millennia, should Father have his way.”

Shamhat nodded. “Perhaps a slave or a descendant of a slave sent off world?”

Humbaba’s eyes narrowed. “No. The language he spoke…it was gibberish. Even telepathic contact is elusive. A slave would be far more communicative.”

Shamhat watched the long-coated newcomer avoid a punch from one of the Nephilim drones with practiced speed, deftly catching the extended limb and bending it using a knowledge of body mechanics that was rare among the peoples of this world. Certainly, the humans calling themselves the Greeks had a similar hand-to-hand maneuver in their wrestling art of pankraton, and those in the Orient were only now developing a fighting craft they called hwarong do. Whoever this man was, he combined strength with skill in such a way that his enemies appeared to be moving at half of his speed.

Shamhat cast out his thoughts in an attempt to reach into the man’s mind, and was repulsed by a torrent of confusion and disjointedness. Tears welled in his yellow orbs in an attempt to salve the sudden, piercing ache behind his brow.

“Ah, you’ve tried your mind against his, as well?” Humbaba asked. “And what say you?”

“That is no man. His brain seems as if it’s at right angles to this universe. What surface memories I could grasp are incomplete and scrambled,” Shamhat replied. “Is he perhaps a shadow from another dimension?”

“A higher plane of existence, perhaps the echoes that a three-dimensional intellect could comprehend only in the shape of a human?” Humbaba asked.

“Theoretically such a creature would exist, but to carry such mundane equipment and garments when his very body would be superhumanly charged in our almost ethereal plane?” Shamhat asked. “He’d also be much faster in reaction to my Nephilim. I’ve honed their reflexes to an edge few have ever known before. This creature seems to be operating at a different time scale, but it’s nothing unique.”

A Nephilim grew tired of the conflict and employed his ASP blaster, twin strings of yellow lightning twisting from the snakelike projectors wound about his wrist. The powerful bolts struck Grant solidly, and he collapsed to his hands and knees.

The other Nephilim fell upon him as one, fists raining down on him.

“Enough!” Humbaba bellowed, his roar causing every creature in the court of Urudug to freeze, even the battered Grant. “He is to be taken alive!”

Strong arms wrapped around Grant’s limbs, the effects of the ASP energy discharge scrambling his thoughts even more. He didn’t know his own name, and he didn’t know why the world seemed to be moving in slow motion around him, but the reptilian creatures who restrained his powerful arms were eerily familiar, though other beings were strange. Some part of him wanted to work his lips, to communicate, but what would fall from them, even if he could form the odd barking sounds shared by these inhuman strangers around him?

He was tired, and he ached from injuries old and new. Phantasms of memories, things that felt familiar and friendly, hovered just out of reach of his consciousness. While he could put terms to things like floor, wall, arm, Nephilim, he had nothing for the faces, the entities attached to the ghostly images in his mind. They should have names, but like Grant’s own name, they eluded him like frightened cockroaches before a sudden light.

I know how insects react to a man’s approach, yet I don’t know the men and women who are a part of my life, Grant thought grimly. Not even my name.

“You may tame this one,” Humbaba said. “Teach him some language if his consciousness will abide it.”

Shamhat nodded, glaring at Grant. “Come, giant. We have much to discuss.”

The Nephilim pushed Grant toward the doorway that Shamhat had indicated. Grant stomped the ground with all his strength, anchoring himself against their efforts. There were four of the reptilian guards, applying their incredible physiques against his own, and yet he was stalling them. This wasn’t right to the lost and confused Grant. He had no right to be this strong, as if he had traded his mental clarity for muscle. Though he felt no heavier, he was indeed even swifter.

Shamhat nodded to the Nephilim who had shot Grant. “Give him another taste of discipline. It will do him good to realize who his masters are.”

The searing energy of the ASP charge struck Grant in the kidneys, his legs buckling. Pain blinded him, and he thrashed, hurling his captors away from him out of agonized reflex. Despite the display of strength, he sank to the floor, unable to breathe.

Shamhat, having recovered from Grant’s first blow against him, reached down and pulled on the human. Grant’s coat sloughed off his shoulders as the man struggled to escape his captivity. “Hit him again!”

More ASP lightning burned through Grant’s nerves, an onslaught of punishment that would have left him a smoldering briquette of charred flesh.

Who am I? Grant thought, staggering back to his feet.

Grant looked up in time to see nearly ten feet of leonine godling, all sculpted muscle and long limbs, standing over him.

“I said enough! I am tired of this foolish game!” Humbaba roared. Grant felt all the solid power of the giant’s crashing fist on his jaw, as if the half-Annunaki lord of this time-lost court were the only other real thing in this turgid dream.

Blessed unconsciousness descended upon Grant.

SILENCE REIGNED in the Operation Chronos laboratories. Kane had watched his best friend in this or any world disappear into the ether in an effort to save Shizuka. The warrior woman trembled, her body trying to reacclimate itself to the reality outside of the strange energies she had been bathed in.

When Kane and Sinclair had burst into the temporal-dilation chamber, they had seen Grant anchored by a heavy cable, tugging on an arm attached to something that Kane was still trying to describe mentally. The limb was pulled thin, like putty that was extruded through a pinhole. The person it had been attached to was a featureless blue ghost shimmering as if underwater. Though his eyes weren’t transmitting the ghost’s identity to Kane’s brain, some instinct told him that it was Shizuka, even before Grant had bellowed her name as he grasped her hand.