God War

“More than that, Magistrate,” Rosalia corrected, indicating the center of the rift.

Grant turned to where the dark-haired woman had indicated and saw the rift in space growing larger, its hourglass shape swelling in the center to disgorge more people with increased vigor. The rift crackled with lightning against a deep nothingness, swirling colors spinning and fraying in its depths, splitting apart to form even more colors as Grant watched. He estimated that the rift was a quarter mile across now, and as it increased in size it became harder to look it, burning against the rods and cones of his retina like some grisly optical illusion. It was an interphase window, Grant knew, but one so large as to reach a scale he had never seen before. The interphaser was designed for personal transport, carrying just a few people and limited matériel at a time. This, however, was on a scale he had never imagined, like some great monument tunneling through the very air over the sun-dappled surface of the Euphrates. Grant had never seen anything like it.

“Where the fuck are they all coming from?” he muttered, shaking his head.

“I attended a few of the rallies for Ullikummis,” Rosalia spoke, her voice low. “Held in the old bombed-out sports stadiums and parking lots, they would regularly attract a thousand, fifteen hundred people at a time. It was quite something seeing that many people chanting in unison.”

Grant turned to look at Rosalia, his brow furrowed, as the army massed behind him. “‘Quite something,’” he repeated. “Huh.”

“What?” Rosalia asked, challenge in her voice.

“It’s never ‘scary’ with you, is it?” Grant observed. “Always just something that happened.”

“The world’s as scary as we choose for it to be, Grant,” Rosalia told him cryptically. “You look at things the way you choose to. No one else makes you frightened but you yourself.”

The rift continued to expel more and more people of all ages and body types. Many of them wore the familiar robes of Ullikummis’s enforcers, some with the red badge shining over their left breast like those of the old Magistrates. There were dogs there, too, Grant saw—strange dogs with long bodies and heavy, loping movements, their shapes carved from living stone.

Ullikummis himself waited at the head of the army, backing slowly away from the rift to allow his followers space to spread out, Brigid and the little girl at his side.

“We’re going to need to get closer,” Grant decided. He was still hefting Domi’s unconscious form in his arms, and despite the burden he showed no signs of tiredness.

Rosalia indicated the albino woman. “Planning on taking her?”

“No,” Grant replied. Then he turned to Kudo, the man who’d lost half his face to the acid spillage inside the bowels of Tiamat. “Kudo, you good to get home if I leave you in charge of Domi?”

Kudo nodded, bringing forth a portable communications device from its secure place in a belt pouch. “I can tap Cerberus comms and ask them to guide me,” he said without arguing. Like all Tigers of Heaven, Kudo was a fearless warrior who would never shy away from a fight. However, he also recognized the need for authority, and bowed to Grant’s decisions as squad leader.

“Great,” Grant said as he passed his pale burden to Kudo. The modern-day samurai took the petite woman, hefting her over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Tell Donald to trace Domi’s transponder. He can use that to guide you to the nearest safe haven from which you can make the jump home.”

Kudo nodded once. “As you command.” Then he walked away from the scene, speaking into the comm unit.

Within moments, Grant and Rosalia were alone at the edge of the citylike dragon ship, watching as the tear in the air continued spilling more of the mismatched troops to the ground.

Rosalia reached down to the handle of her sword, her hand brushing against it to ensure it was still there. “How do you propose we do this?” she asked.

Grant held his right arm out, palm open, and his Sin Eater slapped into his hand from its hiding place beneath his sleeve. “Let’s play it by ear.”

* * *

SELA STONE HEARD the call like a racing drumbeat in her skull, its urgency increasing until it became impossible to ignore. A black-skinned woman, slender and hungry-looking, she had a body that was all toned muscle, no flab. She had not always been called Sela Stone; three months earlier she had been Sela Sinclair, one of the security experts for Cerberus before their redoubt had been infiltrated and all personnel had been taken prisoner. It was a distant memory now, that first vision of Ullikummis as he strode through the familiar corridors of the redoubt with his army of followers, overcoming all attempts to stop them. He had touched her, a fleck of himself embedding in her head like a living thing. The stone put Sela in touch with Ullikummis, helped her to comprehend his will, to accept him as her god.

Since that day, Sela had heard the quiet drums beating over and over in her head. The noise had become reassuring, a heartbeat from another world, the heartbeat of her god and savior. The drumming increased whenever Ullikummis was near, and also when those most important to him—such as the warrior woman known as Haight—came close. And this day, as Sela sat before a small congregation in the old province of Samariumville, preaching the word of Stone, she felt the drums beat louder and faster. As a believer in the future under Ullikummis, Sela had taken her first steps in spreading the word, gathering just a dozen of the outlander farmers in a dilapidated barn to tell them of the glorious utopia that was coming. A few days before, she had still been undercover, hiding in the shadows with her Cerberus teammate, Farrell, giving no indication that she had been turned. Now she was an Alpha, promoting the word of the new god.

“His love is stone, unbreakable, unconquerable,” Sela assured them. “His embrace is the embrace of the all. His future is the pinnacle of achievement, the glory of utopia.”

As she spoke, she could hear the drums inside her head getting faster and faster. She saw the farmers’ eyes widen as something changed behind her, and she turned, her own words turning to silence on her lips. Where the barn wall had been just a moment before now stood a swirling hole of blackness, dark colors twisting within its newly impossible depths, lightning strikes ravaging within. The hole seemed to pulse, subtly changing shape like a living creature breathing in and out. Sela recognized it from her time with Cerberus; it was a rift window created by an interphaser.

She stepped back automatically, giving room for the interphaser’s user to step out—but no one did. Behind her, the congregation of farmers and the hardy-looking women they had taken for their wives watched in awe. “Is this the utopia?” one of them asked. “Has it arrived?”

Sela peered deep into the impossible depths of the quantum window, watching those swirling colors coalesce and part over and over, no two patterns alike. There, deep in the swimming burst of light, fingers seemed to be moving, an upturned hand pulling back as if giving Sela the go-ahead signal. The hand was rough and crudely formed, as if it had been hewed from solid rock. When she saw this, Sela Stone knew just what to do. Without a second’s hesitation, she stepped into the pulsing swirl of darkness, letting the quantum window wash over her like the tide on a beach, bathing her in its power.

An instant later, Sela Stone found herself stepping out of the rift onto an expanse of sand close to a riverbank. Hundreds of people were massing there—perhaps thousands—each one loyal to her master, Ullikummis, a vast sea of people clamoring for space.

Up ahead, Sela could see the silhouette of a dragon, its craning neck lunging into the skies as if to smell the low clouds that danced before the morning sun. The dragon was five or six miles away, at least, yet it was so immense that its head towered over the vista of the Euphrates River, and its wings spread out, reaching to perhaps a mile away from where she stood. The wings were ragged and skeletal, their bones pale-colored struts like some weird panorama of buildings.

Behind Sela, the dozen farmers had followed, stepping from the rift in space to add their bodies to the burgeoning army of Ullikummis. They followed not because of the obedience stone—unlike Sela, they hadn’t received an implant—but because they wanted to believe that there could be this golden future, the one that Ullikummis, their stone-clad fallen angel, had promised.

Sela, like a number of others among the thousands-strong crowd, felt the call because of the stone that had been implanted in her head. Known as an obedience stone, it was a tiny chip from Ullikummis’s own body. He could grow these at will, tearing them from his body like buds from a plant. All of them had a droplet of rudimentary sentience, enough that they could speak to their hosts, bonding with them and influencing their thoughts. Accepting the obedience stone was traumatic, for the stone had to push through the skin to bond itself to the user, but this pain had come to be seen as a rite of passage among the faithful, a sacrifice they made in their devotion to the new god. After all, the faithful preached, the stone created a new way of understanding the world, a new life, and as such, it was a birth and any birth was characterized as much by pain as by joy, was it not?

The stone pulsed within Sela, hugging the lobes of her brain, its tendrils enveloping her mind. The stone brought an enlightenment, a freedom for the bearer. It was an entheogen, bringing to all people who used it a sense of being a part of their god. The stones acted as markers, too, the same way that the transponders were used by the Cerberus people, and it was through these locators that Ullikummis had reached out for his most faithful, opening the multiwindow of the quantum interphase jump in a way that had never been seen before. A hundred quantum gateways had all opened upon the same location—on this location. This, too, was something that Ullikummis had learned in the Ontic Library, accessing its sentient banks of knowledge to discover new ways to utilize the Annunaki technology. These were old secrets, things that had been forgotten millennia ago. Ullikummis could generate parallax points where there were none, and he could fold quantum space in such a way that he could jump between parallax points, ambushing even the most wary of opponents. The old ways were the new ways.

* * *

“DAMMIT!” ROSALIA CURSED as she and Grant prowled warily along the edge of the city, as close as they dared get to the massing army on the banks of the Euphrates.

Grant glared at her. “You want to keep it down?” he warned.

When he looked he saw that Rosalia was holding her left wrist and her teeth were clenched in pain.

“What is it?” Grant asked more gently, regretting his knee-jerk reaction.

“Stone’s playing up,” the dark-haired woman answered, breathing hard through her nostrils.

“Run that by me again?” Grant requested, clearly confused.

“I have the stone inside me,” Rosalia said, “you know that. Damn thing’s pounding against my nerve like a fucking metronome.” She winced, holding down hard on her wrist until the pain passed.

Like Sela Sinclair, Rosalia had one of the obedience stones implanted beneath her skin. But through her own subtle manipulations of her flesh, her stone had remained locked at her wrist, unable to attach itself properly and so bond with her. The stone was of a different variety to Sinclair’s, as it had come not from Ullikummis but from one of his faithful troops. Besides affecting a person’s thought processes, the stone was also used to operate hidden stone locks designed by Ullikummis within his bases, a little like a remote control opened a garage door.

In the earliest days of the Ullikummis religious movement, those with stones would identify those without by just being in their presence. That facet had become less important over time, as more people had joined the Ullikummis movement willingly, truly believing that a new and better world was coming.

Left unchecked, the stones would affect the thinking of anyone who had one, but Rosalia had assured the Cerberus people that she had hers under control. “It only works on the weak-minded,” she had dismissed contemptuously. However, few people knew how much effort Rosalia put in to maintaining the rock’s position beneath her skin, using a needle to cut into her own flesh daily to prevent it from locking there and so forming a more permanent—and dangerous—bond.

Now the rock inside her was drumming against her nerves like something alive.

“You’re all right?” Grant asked.

Rosalia nodded. “Just go.”

Ahead of them, the rift continued to swell, a great wound in the sky. Lightning crackled in its depths as it blurted out more people into the already swollen ranks of Ullikummis’s troops. Among them were the hooded security teams who had assumed the place of the Magistrates, their malleable flesh as hard as stone. There were so many people now that it seemed chaotic.

The buildings around them were not buildings at all. In fact, they were the jutting bones of Tiamat’s wings, reminders that the great organic spaceship had regrown her body from a seed. The structures had indentations and steps and hooded porches, but they had no doors or windows. These things had been grown over with bone, leaving just the ghost of a building that never was.

Grant indicated one of the lower buildings, where a run of steps jutted along its back wall. The steps ended midway up the wall, leaving a whole other story above them. The wall itself bent forward as if it might topple, and another nearby structure did the same, creating a narrow channel between the two at their closest points.

Grant was up the steps in an instant, with Rosalia following. She waited poised at the foot of the steps, keeping a sharp lookout for anybody who might spot them among the long shadows of the early-morning sun before she clambered up the steps after the ex-Mag.

Bolting to the top of the bone steps, Grant reached up with his free hand and grasped high on the wall where it met with the lip of the roof. Without slowing, he pulled himself up, his feet kicking out as he continued to move. In less than two seconds, Grant had flipped himself onto the roof, three stories above ground level. He crouched there, crab-walking to the far edge of the roof where he would have a better view of the massing army.