James Axler - Dragon City

Shortly thereafter, the bored Annunaki had followed Anu, traveling through the starscape until they reached this planet, this Earth, to rediscover what it was to be surprised, even if it was just a little, just for one fleeting second of interest in a lifetime that was beyond measure. The Annunaki had landed in the territories known today as Syria and Iraq, where they had settled. Mistaken by the locals for gods, they had built great cities that acted as expressions of themselves, cities that seemed to challenge the very heavens that they had descended from. The first of these cities was called Eridu, and it nuzzled at the banks of the River Euphrates like an embassy, a piece of foreign real estate amid the humans’ otherwise unspoiled world. Eridu belonged to Enki, brother to Enlil and a prince of the Annunaki royal family. Soon Enlil had his own city, Nippur, and the other members of the royal family established similar territories: Babylon, Ngirsu, Kish and more. Housed within those cities, as the Annunaki found new creatures to toy with, new places to acquire, they began to squabble. Boredom had given way to greed and greed led to envy, and if hate was the only thing keeping boredom at bay then the Annunaki hated wholeheartedly and fought as if their very immortal lives depended upon it.

But that had all ended approximately four thousand years ago, when the Annunaki seemed to disappear from planet Earth.

They had not died, these so-called gods. They had merely retreated into the shadows, their squabbles become too overblown. And so their charges—the infant race known as humankind—came to be more prolific and more advanced on the surface of their planet as the Annunaki turned their attentions inward. In a final gesture, Enlil had sought to destroy humankind along with his own slave caste, the Igigi, to wipe this blight from the planet with that weapon of such exquisite irony—the weapon called water. The events that Enlil had set in motion came to be known as the Great Flood, but it had been a simple exercise in pest control, an exercise that had failed thanks to his own brother’s interference.

And so, from the shadows, Enlil and his brethren watched and waited and secretly guided the events on Earth until they were ready to reveal themselves once more. In the first few years of the twenty-third century, two hundred years after nuclear war had ravaged the planet almost beyond repair, the starship Tiamat had reappeared above planet Earth, and the cycle had begun again. The catalyst was set, the Annunaki had been reborn, emerging from the chrysalis shells of the nine hybrid barons who ruled the old territory that had once been known as the United States of America. The Earth, it seemed, was primed and ready for their takeover; humankind would be crushed once and for all beneath their heel. The Annunaki would rule the Earth once again.

Yet within two years, the plot had failed. The Annunaki, an immortal race who had waited almost four thousand years, guiding humankind’s development from the shadows, orchestrating a nuclear war to thin the population, to cull the herd, had turned on one another once more, and so their promised reign as kings of the Earth was aborted before it had even begun.

In a final act of despair, Tiamat herself, the wombship that had orchestrated their rebirth, had died, sacrificing herself rather than allowing her wilful children to continue taking shots at one another.

Or so it had seemed.

Despite being on board when Tiamat had exploded, Enlil had escaped the fiery destruction via lifeboat, plummeting back to Earth’s soil and bringing with him one single seed that formed the essence of Tiamat herself. The Annunaki were masters of organic technology and they had developed devices that seemed both sentient and lifeless, crossing the boundaries of what it means to be living. Tiamat was one such thing, a dragon-shaped spaceship that was semiliving, that watched and emoted, that felt pain and wished for death. If a spaceship can be said to have a soul, then the seed was that soul.

Enlil had planted the seed beside the banks of the timeless Euphrates, that place where the Annunaki had first established themselves with the city of Eridu many millennia ago. And all those millennia, all those changes and acts and ticking seconds on the clock, had seemed as nothing to Enlil, who viewed time in terms of his own immortality, and so understood how dull time really was.

So now he stood on the banks of the rushing Euphrates once more, as he had thousands of years before, his scales glistening in the sunlight like gold washed with blood. A spiny crest probed the air above his head, plucking at the material of the hooded cloak he wore over his majestic form, the golden armor of his own body. The Euphrates rushed on, timeless and ever-mobile, hurtling to its destination as water will, thriving in the journey, not caring about its end.

Enlil, overlord of the Annunaki, master of the Earth, watched as the water played across the reborn figure of Tiamat, lapping at her scaly flanks. Around him, a towering city had grown once more, dominating the lands all around, engulfing them like an infection, for such is what the buildings were.

As he watched the water, Enlil knew what must be done. He would use the water against the humans once again, use it to create his own army with which to enforce his will.

Death by water. The fate of all humans.

Chapter 1

It felt like the head cold from hell.

For the past five months, all Edwards could remember hearing inside his head was that monotonous droning sound, like a choir of tuneless children rehearsing some song they could never get right, never reaching the second note of the refrain. It was a noise, a droning that was so all-pervasive that it had seemed, over time, to obliterate his own considerations, to wipe them from his mind, blocking his ability to form rational thought.

It wasn’t as though Edwards was what you would call an ideas man, of course. Over six feet tall with the broad shoulders of his father, a muscular body from hours in the gym and the military bearing of an ex-Magistrate, Edwards was a member of the Cerberus team of rebels who strove to defend mankind against the insidious threat of the Annunaki. Edwards’s role had been as muscle, acting as security and bodyguard on field expeditions where the scientists of the organization might run into danger.

He had taken a bullet out in the Pacific, the shell clipping his right ear and leaving it a ravaged lump of flesh. While plastic surgery could have fixed that mangled scar, Edwards had instead chosen to keep that bullet-bitten ear, like some trophy to represent what he was: a man of deeds and not of words.

Right now, Edwards lay in a CAT scanner, eyes closed as the radiation mapped his brain, layer by layer. In the control room, five people watched as the real-time results flashed across the control terminal. Four of them were Cerberus personnel like Edwards, while the fifth was a man named Kazuko who was the on-site physician for this facility overlooking the Pacific Ocean where the Cerberus team had been forced to make their temporary headquarters.

For years now Cerberus had operated out of an ancient military redoubt in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, from which their sixty-strong team had monitored the world and responded to threats at a moment’s notice. But just seven weeks ago the once-secure redoubt had been infiltrated and turned against its personnel. Their leader Lakesh and his team found themselves imprisoned within a cavernous prison called Life Camp Zero. The infiltration had been performed by the loyal troops of Ullikummis, an Annunaki prince who had recently returned to Earth to exact revenge on his father Enlil. The incursion had been achieved in a manner that bypassed the redoubt’s notorious security—Ullikummis had people on the inside. Ullikummis was a genetic abomination, his body clad in stone, and he had displayed a psionic gift with which he could control the rocks around him. Part of that gift had been to create mind-altering stones, buds from his own body that had planted themselves like seeds within unsuspecting humans. Once planted, these seeds—known as obedience stones—had affected a person’s thought process, acting as an entheogen, filling the subject with a sense of euphoria to feel closer to Ullikummis as their god.