God War (20 page)

Balam stared at the wall where the miniature lightning strike had hit. It was getting dangerous in here, and Kane was right in the middle of it.

Balam turned back to his ally. Kane’s hair clung to his scalp, thick with sweat, and his body trembled in place, shaking violently back and forth as he was held in the grip of the navigator’s chair. Balam blanched as new probes lashed out from the back and arms of the semisentient chair, holding the sitter tighter in place.

In his mind, Balam could see what Kane was seeing, viewing it through their mutual bond in the same way that one may recall a memory when one related an incident in conversation. Kane was struggling with his new environment, Balam saw, the surroundings and even his own sense of self breaking apart as the warring gods battled a mere hairbreadth away from him.

“What is going on?” Kane cried out from the chair, tears streaming down his face past the entwined creepers of the chair itself.

Balam stepped closer to his ally, watching as electricity raced across Kane’s body in cruel, jagged arcs here in the physical world even as Kane’s body seemed to get discorporated on another plane.

“Comprehension is a fragile thing,” Balam soothed, his voice low. “You need to focus, remember who you are and try to make sense of that which is around you but is not you.”

Kane shook in place, another burst of energy caroming across the room in a fiery line.

* * *

W
ITHIN
THE
OTHER
PLACE
, Kane heard Balam’s voice as he slunk against the multicolored tesseract wall, his breathing shallow and fast. Balam’s words seemed so close yet so distant, a twin feed of conflicting information, similar to how one tried to incorporate the sounds of the real world within a dream, the mind trying hard to make both things adjust to fit one narrative. Even so, Balam’s voice did something. Its familiarity served as an anchor, bringing Kane back to himself in a rush of color and broken scents. For a moment, Kane stood there as the wall behind him continued to alter and stared at his hands, which seemed complete once more, their lost integrity forgotten. He was himself again; he was Kane.

He stared into the skies above, their burgundy color the same shade as spilled blood, bursting across the heavens in a vicious sprawl. The godlike figures smashed against each other like two forces of nature, elements vying for supremacy.

Kane narrowed his eyes as he watched the two mighty combatants slamming against each other high above his head, galactic forms made of flesh and bone. “Come on,” he urged himself, channeling all of his willpower. “Either step up or back down.” It was the kind of advice drummed into him from the time he was just a boy training to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Kane felt his consciousness expanding, felt the new levels of complexity that had taken the place of his old form. With a determined cry, he began to run across the multicolored street, his feet slamming harder and harder against the stones, the shock waves emanating behind him in ever-widening concentric circles. He was in the gods’ arena now, and it was time to show what sort of a man he really was.

“Grant, where are you?” Kane asked as he sprinted toward his enemies.

Grant’s voice came back after a moment, sounding breathless. “On our way now,” he said. “Just trying to find a safe...path.”

“You sound like you’ve got problems,” Kane said as he ran, faster and faster across the ever-changing street of souls.

“Nah, nah, nah—nothing we can’t handle,” Grant assured him. “You give us a few minutes, and we’ll be all over your problem like stink on a monkey.”

“I’m trusting you,” Kane told him as he threw himself at the foot of the gods, using his body like a cannonball to strike at the ankle of Enlil’s cosmic form.

* * *

G
RANT
HEARD
none of this over the Commtact. All he got was that Kane needed him, and the determination in his voice was unmistakable. The ebony-skinned ex-Mag turned back to Rosalia as the two of them fought off a group of five Annunaki warriors in a wide, four-sided chamber whose walls narrowed to a point at the far end.

“Can we speed this up?” Grant asked.

Rosalia batted away an attacking Annunaki with her black-bladed sword, using a triple strike that turned his attack on himself before driving the point of the blade through his chest. The Annunaki yelped in pain, black blood rushing from his open mouth and amassing along the blade’s length as Rosalia drew the sword clear once more.

“I’d love to,” she told Grant, “but you care to tell me how? We’re outnumbered here and outmatched.”

Grant launched a burst of fire from his Sin Eater in a seemingly casual flick of his wrist, peppering another of the Annunaki warriors with shots from groin to sternum. “We’re not outmatched,” he shouted over the noise, “never that.”

Before Grant, the Annunaki who had taken the clutch of bullets stumbled back, clawed hands scratching at the wounds in his chest. The bullets were having some effect, but it wasn’t enough to fell a single one of these monstrosities.

Beside the ex-Mag, Rosalia drew her sword back, her chest rising and falling with the exertion of battle. “Whatever,” she spit, “we’re getting worn down by numbers here.”

“You’re right,” Grant agreed angrily as the Annunaki regrouped and stalked toward the two of them. As they did so, Grant made a decision. “Stay behind me,” he told Rosalia. “We’re going to do this real quick.”

“Do what—?” Rosalia began, but already Grant was running, building up speed as he charged at the nearest of his foes, the one still recovering from Rosalia’s stab with the black
katana.

Rosalia watched in astonishment as Grant slammed shoulder-first into the Annunaki, batting against the creature with such force that it was knocked off its feet. Grant’s pace never slowed. He swiftly stepped over the falling creature and continued down the wide walkway that cut through the chamber, fists pumping. The next Annunaki was still plucking at the weeping wounds on his chest where Grant had shot him. Grant’s fist shot out with the force of a juggernaut, slugging the reptilian monster across his jaw with a great crack of bone. The creature turned to react, but Grant hadn’t even slowed; he just carried on along the marked walkway toward the group of three who waited by an iris door.

Rosalia hurried in his wake, astounded at the sheer brutality of Grant’s attack. They had been caught up in combat almost continuously for a twelve-hour period and yet, somehow, Grant had found his second wind. He was as strong now as he had been when they had first landed in the dragon city, back when laser lights had painted the night skies in searing flashes of red.

Skirting past the first of their fallen foes, Rosalia lashed out with her blade as the second struggled to recover from Grant’s jackhammer blow. The alien creature cried out, grasping for her blade with one clawed hand and gripping it tightly.

Rosalia pivoted, twirling on the spot as she pulled her blade from the Annunaki’s grip. The blade came free in a spurt of blood, the tips of three fingers dropping free from the Annunaki’s damaged hand.

They’re getting weaker, Rosalia realized. Somehow, even as Grant had found his second wind, their Annunaki challengers were visibly weakening.

Before Rosalia could impart her observation to Grant, the Cerberus man charged into the remaining Annunaki at the doorway, his arms spread wide to encompass all of them as he threw himself toward the deck. The Annunaki crashed back like bowling pins, crumbling in one great mass as Grant landed on top of them. Then his Sin Eater was back in his hand, jumping as it spit bullets in their faces in a continuous stream that echoed from the hard walls of the two-story chamber.

Rosalia sprinted across the room, joining Grant as he leaped free of the tangled bodies. The Annunaki were struggling to right themselves, ooze spurting down their beautiful, flawless bodies.

“Keep going, Magistrate,” Rosalia urged.
“¡Vámonos!”

Grant didn’t need telling twice. He hefted his mighty frame to the iris door, peppering its controls with 9 mm bullets as he ran toward it. In a flash, the controls burst into electric flame and the iris opened, the petals spinning away in a swirl.

Grant leaped through the doorway, Rosalia following just a second behind him.

They were in an elevator now, its floor long and as thin as a plank, a vast drop into the guts of
Tiamat
visible to either side. Like many of the spaceship’s faculties, the elevator doors worked like an air lock, a twin set of doors backing one to the other. Grant slapped his palm against the control board, closing the doors and commanding the elevator to ascend.

“You look like you’ve done this before,” Rosalia said.

Grant nodded, though he was paying attention to reloading his Sin Eater while they were safely in transit. “’Cause I’ve been here before,” he explained. “
Tiamat
’s different now, but not that different.”

Rosalia looked at Grant as he reloaded his weapon, and she could see that he was breathing heavily. He was covered in gunk, the blood and ooze of the Annunaki marring his black Kevlar coat and shadow suit.

“They’re getting weaker,” Rosalia told her partner. “You notice?”

Grant smiled, shaking his head. “Not really, but I’ll take your word for it,” he said as he pushed a new magazine home into the Sin Eater’s cartridge slot.

Then the elevator doors opened and Grant and Rosalia found themselves on a higher level, the corridor illuminated in greens and blues from lights running along the floor. Just for a moment, the lighting made Rosalia think of the ocean. And then she spotted the familiar reptilian figures hurrying toward them from the far end of the corridor.

“Here we go again,” Grant declared, raising the Sin Eater in a two-handed grip.

* * *

E
LSEWHERE
,
IF
THAT
TERM
had any meaning in such circumstances, Kane found himself fighting on the multiplanes of fractal space. At first, it had seemed that the Annunaki paid no attention to him, battling as they were at such an intensity that it reverberated across the tesseract angles of the universe. But as the conflict continued, Kane realized that this was not a battle that would be settled by physical strength—how could it? It was occurring at a level far removed from anything that could be described as physical. No, here was a battle that was defined by willpower, one resolve challenging another.

Kane drew on his own great reserves as Lakesh fed him information via Commtact about the nature of string theory. Kane tried to understand what he was being told, but all he really knew was that—no matter how strange things became—he needed to keep his own grip on sanity. It was his will, his self-image, that fought this battle against so-called gods, man against superior beings.

And as he drew more from his own self-determination, Kane seemed to grow, bringing himself if not to the size of the gods then at least to something that rivaled David facing two great Goliaths.

The Annunaki fought through the angles, appearing and disappearing in ways that Kane could barely follow let alone comprehend, their shadow shapes interweaving with each other as they strove for supremacy, pouring through Kane like water through a sieve.

Kane, for all his strength of will, looked to the familiar to fight his corner. Astride the heavens, fighting atop the ever-changing angles of the city hidden in the cosmic warp, Kane flinched his wrist tendons and called forth his Sin Eater, the handgun unfolding as it slapped into the palm of his hand. The pistol looked different now, no longer made from brutal lines of metal, but bulging and curved, a nipplelike minaret at its end. Kane had the disconcerting feeling he was firing with a temple rather than a gun, and the ammunition was belief—man’s belief in his ability to chart his own destiny.

Kane watched as the blaster kicked, a trail of pure whiteness lancing across the heavens to strike the swirling clouds that formed Enlil. The blast hit, shooting through the sky like spilled paint, erupting against the chest of the great Annunaki overlord, and Kane cheered as he saw Enlil stagger and fall under that punishing assault. In that moment, a god fell from the sky, crashing through the universe due to the determination of one man.

Kane was winning. Despite the unbelievable odds, he was winning.

Behind Kane, Ullikummis—whose form here seemed to be a hundred forms with a thousand names—struck a mighty punch, knocking Kane to the ground.

And not just to the ground—through it.

Kane cried out as he fell through another layer of the universe, rocketing through the unfamiliar angles of string space.

Chapter 16

It was like falling. His stomach dropped away from him and he felt that horrible sense of giddiness, the same feeling one got from flying within a dream. All around him, the ten thousand colors of god rushed past as if he were falling through a tunnel or a great winding tube. The colors flickered by faster, giving Kane the sensation that his speed was increasing.

Kane turned his head, trying to look up, but all he saw was the same thing, a great tunnel of color shooting toward him, as if he were falling into it, as if no matter which way he turned he was still falling. The angles were different here, Lakesh had told him; there were more angles than Kane had ever comprehended.

“The conceit of string theory, which has been further developed with superstring theory,” Lakesh had said, “holds that the component parts of reality are vast strings that oscillate so as to achieve a charge. That is the charge that we associate with neutrons, electrons and so on.”

“Cut the twenty-credit words,” Kane had replied as he stared at the towering forms of the Annunaki in superspace, “and just give me the summary.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Lakesh had replied over the Commtact with evident embarrassment. “I have been surrounded by physicists and quantum mechanics for too long.

“Superstrings exist in our world, and thus we see them. But they also exist in further dimensions. The very simplified version is that the string loops out behind the facade that we perceive. Each string has a different harmonic, and there had been much debate in the scientific community in the latter years of the twentieth century as to just how many aspects these strings have. Which is to say, how many dimensions they cross.”

“By dimensions,” Kane asked, “what are we talking? Alternate earths and nutty timelines?”

“No, Kane,” Lakesh said, barely concealing the laughter in his voice. “Length and breadth and depth are dimensions, the dimensions that we are familiar with in our world. Now you must imagine others. What your brain is seeing there—wherever there is—are the additional dimensions, ones we have no real means of comprehending.”

“How many dimensions are we talking about here, Lakesh?” Kane asked.

“Well, that’s a good question. Before the nukecaust occurred, there were a number of competing theories as to just how many dimensions were involved in any string theory,” Lakesh explained. “There were even suggestions in the 1990s that several of the popular superstring theories in fact interconnected, that they were each calculating just one aspect of the equation and that all could be joined to create a greater understanding—”

“How many?” Kane butted in impatiently.

“Ten is the base level that all superstring theory works from. Any less than that and the hypothesis would not function,” Lakesh explained. “But there have been numerous other theories that contest anywhere upward of twenty facets—or dimensions—to the strings.”

“So you don’t know for sure?” Kane queried.

“Kane, you must try to understand that this is the stuff of high-end theoretical physics. Superstring is one of those rarefied beasts—a theory of everything.”

“And I’m fighting in the middle of it,” Kane grumbled. “Good to know.”

Now Kane gritted his teeth as he continued to fall in whatever direction it was he was falling, discovering new angles as he was drawn deeper and deeper into the war of the Annunaki.

What it took was focus, he knew. If he could keep his sense of self, then the rest would follow, making reason from the chaos that he was staring into.

With a steadying breath, Kane closed his eyes and let the sensation of falling drift away, like spume on the ocean. He needed to get back to the battle, and to do that he needed to have a cast-iron sense of who he was fighting.

“Kane,” he muttered. “Kane.”

He could always leave them alone, let these two alien conquerors battle it out. If he did, there was a chance that one or other of them would die, but to do so would be handing the victor the metaphorical keys to Earth, with all those indoctrinated peoples just waiting to bow down before an alien master. No, Kane’s place was here, rushing across the angles, bringing his own brand of Magistrate justice to two pretender gods who thought they were better than humankind.

Kane opened his eyes, and he saw the world resolve around him, dark and foreboding. Everything was black now, the line of the horizon a multicolored slit in the far distance, a lone tree waiting there. Enlil and Ullikummis were gone, and Kane needed to find them.

He turned, searching the landscape with a frantic gaze. It was black, everything was black, as if all the color had been torn away. And there was nothing, just that distant horizon line waiting eerily in a thin band of multicolor.

“Grant,” Kane shouted, engaging his Commtact, “you want to maybe hurry things up at your end? I can’t take both of them on my own.” In fact, I can’t even see them, he added to himself.

* * *

“W
E
’
RE
ALMOST
THERE
,” Grant stated as he assessed his current situation. “Hang tight just a little longer.”

Aboard the spaceship
Tiamat,
he and Rosalia were hurrying along a corridor that had only a wall on one side. The other side ended in a sheer drop that overlooked a containment bay, eerily half-grown personnel ships waiting there like discarded abortions. The corridor itself was constructed of some kind of bone that had similar qualities to metal plate, and it was too narrow to fit three people abreast.

Up ahead, Grant spotted two more of the Annunaki warriors, their scales rippling in red and green as they hurried down the corridor to meet the intruders.

Grant raised the Sin Eater as he ran to them, swinging it in an abbreviated arc and snapping off a burst of fire at the enemy. Rosalia jogged several paces behind him, her dark ponytail bobbing up and down as she kept up with the long strides of the ex-Magistrate.

Nine millimetre slugs whizzed down the corridor, tearing chunks of flesh out of the red-scaled Annunaki before Grant reached him. Rosalia had been right, Grant realized; they were deteriorating. There could be no question of it now. An hour earlier, the Annunaki would have shrugged off his bullets with relative ease, but now the bullets were capable of cutting into their flesh in great swathes, hacking chunks from their armored skin.

As the two groups of antagonists met, Rosalia kicked out and to the side, her heel rebounding from low on the wall, sending her vaulting up into the air. At the same time as she leaped, Rosalia flicked her
katana
through a wide circle, causing it to meet with the green-skinned Annunaki as she sailed over his head. The Annunaki hissed in pain as the sword caught his shoulder, helplessly turning as the sword pulled him three feet across the narrow corridor.

Rosalia landed in a graceful two point at the very edge of the walkway, her left foot meeting the floor just before her right. The green skin was less lucky. Staggering back under the sword strike under one foot, he went over the edge of the deck. Rosalia gritted her teeth in a bitter smile as the Annunaki dropped over the side, screaming as he fell into the docking bay with its half-formed spaceships.

Grant, meanwhile, was trading blows with the red Annunaki, a female with a single vertical spine jutting from her scalp like a radio antenna. Grant used his weight to best advantage, slamming into the female as her body bled where his shots had struck just moments before. The Annunaki shrieked, a horrible sound in the stillness of the corridor, backing up under the force of Grant’s blow until she fell against the wall.

Grant brought the Sin Eater up once more, depressing the trigger and blasting a stream of bullets into the alien’s shrieking face. Chunks of her face and skull spattered the wall behind as Grant blew her brains out.

Rosalia’s eyes met with Grant as he reloaded his blaster. “Fun being on the rush-rush, huh?” she said.

And then they were off again, hurrying through the unguarded doorway at the far end of the corridor and passing into a small room that contained Enlil’s monitoring equipment.

* * *

K
ANE
WALKED
across that dead landscape for a long time, wondering just what it was he was really looking at. It was almost entirely black before his eyes, and yet he got a definite sense of distance, the unwavering line of the horizon a multicolored band across his field of vision. Whatever the angles were, he was struggling to find Ullikummis or Enlil here.

After a while, Kane spotted something waiting on the horizon to his left, and he trudged toward it, one foot after the other. As he approached, he saw that the thing in question was the tree he had seen from high above, but it was unlike any tree he had ever seen before. The tree was drawn in thin lines, and each one contained the colors of the spectrum. It was as if the tree’s image had been carved on the eerie tableau of midnight black.

The tree featured a narrow trunk that reached straight into the air, and its branches stood at regular intervals along its side, the circles of its blossoms running up its sides and middle, with one more blossom poised at the apex of the trunk itself. The blossoms were spherical and, like the tree and the line of the distant horizon, each was multicolored, the colors shimmering and changing in a random pattern that seemed soothing.

Kane looked at it for a long while, wondering what to make of it. “Balam, can you see this?” he asked.

Disembodied, Balam’s voice came from very close. “I see what you see, Kane,” he confirmed. “However, I admit to being as mystified as you are.”

Kane stared at the tree, walking slowly around it, the sounds of distant wind charging across the
otherwise empty plane. There was nothing significant that he could see. The tree appeared the same from every angle, those ten clusters of blossoms arranged up and down its length.

Exasperated, Kane glanced up at the sky, searching for a hint of where the dueling Annunaki were. They had to be here somewhere, it stood to reason—after all, he had been drawn into this dimension by their touch. But there was nothing in the sky, just that simple black sheet identically reflecting the ground.

“Lakesh,” Kane said, “I need your input here. I’m lost.”

“What can you see?” Lakesh asked, his voice coming loud and clear through the Commtact.

“I’m in a characterless environment,” Kane summarized, “and the only thing here is a tree.”

“Can you describe it?”

Kane did, and he explained how everything else was simply black.

“I admit that—if you’ll forgive a little irony—I am stumped, my friend,” Lakesh said. “Many are the cultures that believe in a tree of life, but that is simply philosophy. Despite your spiritual quest, I can see no relation to what you are seeing there now.”

“But I’m not seeing it, am I?” Kane reminded him. “I’m seeing an interpretation of your string theory, right?”

“Well, now, Kane,” Lakesh sputtered, “it’s
not
my theory. Superstrings were first—”

“Tree,” Kane interrupted, reminding Lakesh to concentrate on the issue at hand. “What do I do?”

“I don’t know,” Lakesh admitted. “Climb it?”

“Sure, why not,” Kane groused and he grabbed hold of the lowest branch and began to pull himself up. “Nothing else to do ’round here.”

* * *

G
RANT
AND
R
OSALIA
PACED
warily through the monitoring room. The room had no source of light other than the strange displays themselves, which hung like mist in the air above the crescent-shaped databank.

Grant slowed, his eyes scanning each of the displays, their soft edges disappearing into nothingness. Several showed a feed from outside the ship’s hull, where the human army loyal to Ullikummis was fighting for survival against the reborn Annunaki. There, as aboard the ship, the Annunaki seemed to be struggling, their bodies failing them as the hideous combat continued amid streets created by the channels of bone.

Elsewhere among the feeds, Grant recognized the docking bay where he and Rosalia had entered, and next to that display he saw a figure he knew. It was Brigid Baptiste, her vibrant red hair unmistakable. She seemed to be standing in a midsize chamber with a stone item at its center. The stone thing was poised like an upright peanut, standing a little shorter than she was.

“There’s Brigid,” Grant said, pointing her out on the displays.

“What’s that she’s standing by?” Rosalia asked, bending to get a better look.

“Not sure,” Grant ruminated. “Looks kinda like an egg.”

Rosalia searched the monitoring room, looking for the door. There were two: one in the far wall, hidden behind a monitoring bank, the other a hatch set in the floor. “This way, I think,” she said, indicating the doorway in the wall.

“In a minute,” Grant said as his brown eyes scanned the feeds one last time, searching for anything that may help them, searching for Kane. One feed showed the waterlogged chamber, while another showed the engine room with its strange, hooded engineers scurrying about like rats. Then, after a moment Grant spotted Enlil on one of the mistlike windows, his body showing several new wounds.

“Enlil’s still alive, I see,” Grant grumbled.

He watched for a moment longer as Ullikummis appeared in frame, driving one of his heavy rock fists into the Annunaki overlord’s face and sending him sprawling to the floor. A stream of symbols flashed across the shimmering display, their precise meaning lost on Grant though they reminded him of the biolank data that the transponder beacons broadcast for Cerberus personnel. Now, if he could only make sense of those displays, he could perhaps figure out who was winning. Grant’s brow furrowed as he stared at the raindroplike displays, watching their colors flash and change. Then after a moment he shook his head in defeat.

“Screw it,” Grant muttered, striding across the control room to join Rosalia at the door.

Seconds later, the two of them were through the door and into another narrow corridor, this one with bulging walls like a flattened hexagon.