God War

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 1

It was a little after dawn in Luilekkerville on the West Coast of what used to be known as the United States of America. The morning air still fresh and cool against his face, Minister Morrow rubbed his hand over his clean-shaved jaw and looked up at the golden ball of the sun as it rose over the cathedral. Placed in the exact center of the ville, the cathedral towered over the buildings around it, dominating the skyline.

The ville itself had the air of a construction site, half-built edifices poised along the straight streets, as if patiently waiting in line for their builders to return after a good night’s sleep. So much had changed here since the days when this walled settlement had first grown up from the ashes of bombed-out Snakefishville. Back when it had been ruled by Baron Snakefish, the gates had been kept locked, the high walls patrolled by the Magistrates. Those were things of the past now. These days, under its new and hopeful name, Luilekkerville’s gates were ever open, the new Magistrates welcoming all visitors that they might perhaps join the congregation. Minister Morrow took heart in that, feeling in part responsible thanks to his imparting of firm moral guidance to the newcomers to the ville, encouraging the work ethic that had seen so much rebuilding over the ruins of the old.

A balding middle-aged man with ruddy cheeks and a square face, Morrow was dressed in his simple robes of office: a fustian cassock with a wide hood that could be pulled forward to hide his face in shadow. He was an Alpha, first priest in the New Order that had dedicated itself to a better world under the stone god who had returned from Heaven to spread his message of peace. The god’s name was Ullikummis, but that hardly mattered. What he brought—what he was even now in the process of bringing—was utopia, Heaven on Earth.

Human society had suffered more than two hundred years of blight, first with the nuclear conflict that launched the twenty-first century and wiped out billions in what seemed a determined effort at mutual destruction. Then came the Deathlands era, a hundred years of radioactive hell that only the strongest could survive, clawing their way through the debris as they struggled to reassert some measure of order on the chaos. And then, approximately one hundred years ago, the Program of Unification had finally restored order to the ruined United States in the form of nine settlements called villes, each one named after its baron, who served as its absolute ruler. But even these villes were far from utopian. Unknown to most citizens, their rulers were engaged in a strictly regimented purge of the past, obliterating the details of humankind’s advances prior to the nukecaust.

In their way, too, the villes were exclusive. Each housed a set number of individuals: five thousand aboveground, a further thousand in the Tartarus Pits at their lowest levels. Perimeter walls kept out the so-called outlanders, who were often viewed as dangerous in their nonconformity and many of whom were still affected by residual radiation from the nukecaust. If the baronies had been designed to provide some kind of respite, they had failed, ultimately sinking into chaos when the barons fled.

What Ullikummis and his adherents promised was a truly better tomorrow, a new society unlike anything seen before in the short history of humankind. What was more, the proof of this claim was already visible. The truly faithful, those blessed by the touch of Ullikummis himself, were able to channel his power, turning their flesh into something with the impenetrability of stone; Morrow had seen them in action. These people, the Stones, were the military arm of the new regime, the new Magistrates of the bright promised future.

As his ministerial robes billowed about him in the wind, Morrow stared at the towering structure of the cathedral. Its circular scarlet window dominated the spire like a cyclopean eye, and Morrow smiled. The future was here, so close he could taste it, smell it on the air.

His congregation was large, and even though the cathedral could seat more than eight hundred, it was frequently filled to brimming when he called the faithful to prayer. And not just with the people of the ville itself, but others, outlanders from the surrounding lands who came from near and far to pledge their commitment to the dream of a better world.

This day, however, Minister Morrow would have a special message to impart to his congregation. As he headed toward the always-open entrance to the towering cathedral, he saw the familiar figure waiting inside among the wooden pews. The man was in his late thirties and had the strong build of a farmer, his loose shirt buttoned low. His name was Christophe, and he was one of more than a hundred who had built the cathedral when Luilekkerville was just beginning to emerge from the debris of the old barony. These days,

Christophe helped Minister Morrow with the upkeep of the church, working as a handyman.

“Our love is a rock,” Christophe said by way of greeting.

In response, Minister Morrow nodded. “What brings you here so early, Christophe?”

“Woke up early,” Christophe told him. “Strange dreams, and then I couldn’t get back to sleep. There’s something coming,” he explained vaguely.

“I felt it, too,” the minister agreed.

“Then what should we do, Minister?” Christophe asked.

Morrow looked out across the interior of the vast, empty cathedral, its seats lined up in blocks, all of them facing the central dais, and he knew just what to do. “Ring the bell,” he told Christophe. “Call the faithful. Call them home.”

* * *

“GOOD MORNING, Haight.”

Brigid Haight opened her eyes, the last whispers of the dream leaving her in that familiar whirl of colors, blue, gold and green. Across from the simple cot that she slept in—its bedding made up of an untidy blanket rolled in on itself beneath her head to provide some form of pillow—waited the great giant Ullikummis, her lord and master. He stood eight feet tall, his body formed of rock dark as mud with a weather-beaten look to it that made one think of the ocean batting against cliffs. Veins of magma hurried between the plates of his chest and along the joints of his arms and legs, their orange glow shimmering in the dark room like the ebbing rays of sunset. His tree-trunk-like legs ended in two flaring stumps, the feet long since hacked away in a vicious battle with his uncle, Enki. His body was unclothed, for he needed none. Indeed, he simply was, needing no adornments for his powerful form. Pointing struts reached up from his shoulder blades, forming twin ridges like the horns of a stag, mismatched and pointing inward toward his head in great scything curves. The head itself seemed ugly, misshapen, its ridges hard and uneven. Formed of rock like the rest of him, Ullikummis’s was the face of nightmare, dark stone eroded by weather rather than carved with the delicacy of a statue. A slash of mouth waited grimly beneath a flattened nose, twin eyes burning with magma like pits beneath a thick brow. Humanoid in form, the creature known as Ullikummis was entirely hairless.

He stood in the doorway, the familiar charcoallike muster of his body wafting to Brigid’s nostrils as he waited there, so tall he dominated the room before he had fully entered. A child stood before him, a girl no more than three years old, her long, wispy hair reaching midway down her back in feathery waves of a blond so pale it was almost white. She wore a simple dress, its creamy yellow somehow enhancing the paleness of her skin. The girl was called Quavell or Quav, named after her mother, and she was a hybrid of human and alien DNA. But Ullikummis called her only by her true name, the name of the programmed template hidden within her genetic code—Ninlil, the name of his mother. He stood now with his stone-clad hands resting gently on the girl’s shoulders, protective, possessive.

Seeing Brigid’s confusion, Ullikummis spoke again, his voice rumbling like the grinding stones of a mill. “You seem ill at ease, my hand in darkness.”

Brigid shook her head momentarily, willing the feeling of sleep from her body. “I dreamed of shapes...” she muttered, “colors.” Her words seemed confused, as if she was trying to describe a thing just out of sight.

She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, with porcelain skin and vibrant red hair that ran down her back in a cascade of tangled curls. Twin emerald orbs peered from beneath dark makeup that had been smeared like a black shadow across her eyes. Her full lips were darkened to the harsh purple of a bruise, and her cheeks seemed narrow and drawn. While those full lips invoked a tender, sultry side, her high forehead hinted at her formidable intelligence. Brigid pushed the blanket away from her naked body, revealing the trim, slender form of a trained athlete, strong but remaining enviably feminine.

They were inside a sea fortress off the East Coast of North America. The fortress had been named Bensalem by its originator Ullikummis, who had drawn it alone from the depths of the ocean stone by stone, shaping it with the power of his formidable will the way a sculptress might carve a pot. The placement of the fortress had been paramount, sitting atop a hidden parallax point—one of a network of nodes across the globe that served to function as access points for a teleportational system.

Brigid’s room itself was small and cold with a narrow opening in its stone wall that served as a window. Through this, she could hear the waves crashing against the high stone sides of the island fortress, feel the billowing breeze from the ocean and smell its briny aroma as the sun rose. The walls of the room were hard rock, rough and unfinished as if a cliff face had been sheared away. Embedded within those walls, faint lines of

orange-red glowed in jagged rents, each no wider than half an inch and splayed across the walls like the shards of a shattered windshield. Throbbing and pulsing, those orange rents seemed uncannily alive.

As Brigid shrugged aside her covers, feeling the cold dawn air on her skin, Ullikummis spoke again in that voice like grinding millstones. “The stars are aligned,” he said. “The day is upon us.”

Her body revealed, there were bruises there, too, circles in the deepest purples and blues as if her mouth had been made up in sympathy. The white-blond girl, Little Quav, trotted across the room to Brigid as she pulled herself from the bunk, an innocent smile in her eyes. The girl tottered a little, neither walking nor running but instead a kind of combination of the two as she hurried over to Brigid’s arms. “Brigly,” she said, excitement in her voice.

Brigid held her arms open, encircling the girl as she sat at the edge of the bunk. The hybrid girl felt warm as she pressed against Brigid’s breasts.

“Good morning, munchkin,” Brigid said. The epithet seemed strange to her, distant, like something made of mist.

The girl had been with them for six days now. Though fearless, she had cast Brigid as a mother figure in the echoing stone fortress. That was only natural; to an extent, Brigid had been a mother to her since her birth almost three years earlier. Little Quav’s hybrid mother had died shortly after childbirth, leaving the child orphaned. A key player in the genetic arms race between humans and Annunaki, Quav had been in danger from the very moment of her birth. For her own safety, the hybrid child was entrusted into the foster care of Balam, the last of a race known as the First Folk. For the past few years, Balam had raised the child as his own in the abandoned city of Agartha, hidden deep beneath the Altyn Tagh region of Tibet. However, as she had become older and hence more self-aware, the outwardly human Quav had begun to question the obvious differences between herself and her foster father. She had delighted in the few contacts she had had with people, understandably feeling a kind of instant kinship with them after her time with Balam. Brigid had been one of those people; she and Quav had met on brief occasions where the girl had formed her attachment. Haight had been known by another name then, however—her birth name of Brigid Baptiste, and she had worked for the Cerberus organization tasked with the protection of humanity from the alien machinations of the insidious race called the Annunaki.

The Annunaki were a race of aliens who had first visited Earth many millennia ago, back when humankind was still hiding in trees from saber-toothed tigers. With their strange, reptilian appearance and incredible technology, the Annunaki had been mistaken for gods by the primitive local populace, an error that they had reveled in, encouraging their worship as false idols, and they constructed their vast golden cities of Eridu, Nippur, Babylon and others on the virgin soils of Earth. Though hailed in Sumerian mythology as gods, the Annunaki themselves were in fact a near-immortal race from the planet Nibiru, whose group memories were passed on—complete—to their descendants and the others of their race. By the time they arrived on Earth, the Annunaki had become bored with their lives, gripped by a self-destructive ennui engendered by the nature of their vast shared memories. With no individual experience in living memory, it was hoped that the conquering of this new planet would stave off the crushing boredom of their lives—and for a time it had. Here were new territories to control, new creatures to toy with and experiment on. For a while, the gods had warred, battling for territory, for supremacy, for the adulation of the primitives that littered the planet all about them. But finally—perhaps, inevitably—they had become bored with their new playthings, and Overlord Enlil, the cruelest of their number and the master of the city of Nippur, had unleashed a great torrent to wipe the planet of the scourge of humankind like a spoiled child tossing aside his toys. This torrent had been enshrined in man’s history under various names, most notably as the Great Flood of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Enlil’s plot failed thanks to the deceptions of his own brother, Enki, and the Great Flood did not wipe humankind from the face of the planet. Thus, while the Annunaki retreated into the shadows, humanity flourished. For the subsequent four thousand years, humanity reigned until, on January 20, 2001, a devastating nuclear holocaust had been unleashed by the antagonistic powers of East and West. This war, and the subsequent Deathlands era of privation that followed, had in fact been part of a long-term plan by the Annunaki to reassert their own dominance over the indigenous race, thinning the herd before reemerging two hundred years after the nukecaust to finally take their place as rulers of the world. That audacious plan had involved the creation of artificially evolved bodies in the forms of the hybrid barons, of whom Little Quav was the ultimate progeny. Each of these hybrids had been prepped to accept a genetic download from the starship Tiamat, literally a mother ship for the Annunaki.

However, once the nine barons had been reborn in their original, lizardlike forms as the royal family of the Annunaki, old rivalries and prejudices had rapidly emerged, and the nine overlords were soon at war with one another for ultimate control of the territories once more. Stuck between the factions, a plucky group of human adventurers working together under the banner of Cerberus managed to turn the Annunaki’s plans back on themselves, destroying their mother ship and leaving the various overlords for dead.

Or so it had appeared.

Over recent months, several Annunaki had reappeared, including Enlil and the mad goddess called variously Lilitu, Lilith or Ezili Coeur Noir. Nearly ruined by the destruction of their womb ship, each of these old gods had struggled to gain a new foothold on the power they all craved. However, unknown to the Annunaki, things had become more complicated than they realized when Ullikummis, errant son of Overlord Enlil, had returned to Earth after a four-and-a-half-thousand-year exile.

Far from being a typical Annunaki, Ullikummis was a genetic freak whose DNA had been twisted beyond recognition at his father’s behest, turning him into a monster even among his own people. Heartless in the execution of his plan, Ullikummis’s father, the Overlord Enlil, had altered his son to become an assassin, a slayer of gods. Enlil had called the child his hand in darkness and sent him on a mission to destroy Teshub and gain the operational codes for Tiamat with which he might preside over the Annunaki. But the plan had backfired, and Ullikummis—along with his tutor, the disease-

ridden Upelluri—had been ambushed by Enlil’s brother, Enki. That brutal exchange had resulted in Ullikummis losing both feet at the keen edge of Enki’s sword and subsequently being disowned by his father, imprisoned in an asteroid and exiled into space. A by-blow child of rape, two contentions had driven Ullikummis to survive through the long period of his exile—that his father had orchestrated his downfall for his own insidious needs, and that his mother, Ninlil, was an innocent in need of rescue from this monster.

Now Ninlil’s genetic code was contained within the child known as Little Quav, whom Brigid Haight had enticed from Balam’s protection in the buried city of Agartha just six days earlier. The child seemed remarkably human, inquisitive and often finding pleasure in her own thoughts. Raised by Balam in the abandoned city, it was only natural that she should find joy in her own company, and Brigid had watched her at play in the cold, cavernous corridors of Fort Bensalem. The child would make a plaything of whatever came to hand, giving stones and material personalities and little voices when she thought no one was looking, frequently making up songs that she would sing to herself, endless loops of rhyming noises that—as often as not—were not words at all.

Although the child looked automatically to Brigid for compassion and comfort, she expressed no fear of Ullikummis, in spite of his monstrous appearance. Seeing the two of them together made for an incongruous sight: the girl not yet three feet in height with the tiny, birdlike build of the hybrids, while he was eight feet tall and as solid as living stone. Brigid had been surprised to see that, despite his appearance and eminent practicality, Ullikummis was capable of tenderness. He befriended the child by honoring her, the way a child will honor a parent, a man or a god.

In the curtailed week that Quav had spent at the rock-walled fortress, Ullikummis had lavished long hours speaking with her, patiently explaining her role in the Annunaki royal family, her destiny and importance to his own plans. He had done this both as a teacher and a friend, never once berating the young child for her impatience or because her attention span did not equal his.

Ullikummis was exceptionally patient, Brigid had observed as he conversed with the child, something she had not really credited before now. She had first met Ullikummis in her other life, when she had been a Cerberus warrior opposed to all things Annunaki. Ullikummis had returned to Earth in his space prison, landing in the wilds of Canada, and he had immediately set about building his own army within the structure he called Tenth City. While he was monstrous and harsh in his manner, looking back Brigid realized he had never been impatient. Even as he suffered an attack and seemingly ignoble defeat, Ullikummis himself had simply stepped back, hiding himself in the shadows and letting the Cerberus warriors see what they wanted to see, believing him killed in an incinerator explosion. At heart he was an assassin, his father’s one-time hand in darkness, and so his natural inclination was to step back, to merge with the shadows and let the world turn around him while things ran their course, secure in the knowledge he could strike when the time was right.

Brigid’s second meeting with Ullikummis had come in the Ontic Library, an undersea storeroom that housed the blueprints to reality itself. Ullikummis had accessed the library to amass more knowledge about his father from its sentient datastream, but his brutal incursion had damaged the structures of the library itself. Brigid had joined her then-colleagues from Cerberus in expelling Ullikummis from the incredible library before the damage proved irrevocable, and it had been her consciousness that had been melded with the living data to shore up the library’s defenses. Ullikummis had encountered her then, their astral forms meeting, but his perception had been so altered by the library that he had been unable to recognize her. It was only later, once the Annunaki prince was freed from the datastream, that he had realized who it was he had come in touch with—and he had decided at that moment that he needed to recruit this fearsome intellect for his own cause, lest she prove his downfall.