James Axler - Planet Hate

The wind blew around the woman as she clambered along the rough path, her booted heels breaking the night frost that covered it before sinking into the layer of snow that dwelled beneath like a bloated egg white. Her name was Brigid Haight and she had made this approach before, several years ago when she had been a member of the Cerberus team. That had been before Ullikummis had remade her, showing her the true path and filling her head with a secret knowledge that had always seemed just out of reach before.

Back then she had been known as Brigid Baptiste, an archivist from Cobaltville who had formed one-third of the seemingly inseparable trinity that lay at the heart of Cerberus. Where Kane had brought his integrity and Grant his strength, Brigid had brought knowledge. Blessed with an eidetic memory, Brigid had the ability to recall information to the smallest detail with photographic accuracy. She had traveled the globe under the aegis of Cerberus, expanding her experiences and her knowledge and challenging her archivist’s mind with the most complex of conundrums. Alongside Kane and Grant, Brigid Baptiste had learned of the secret history of the Earth, uncovered a conspiracy that stretched back millennia and placed the star-born Annunaki at the top of the evolutionary tree. In those days Brigid had thought that humankind should rebel against this notion, that Cerberus was engaged in a noble fight to turn these alien usurpers away and free humanity from the shackles of their subjugation. She had been naive.

Ullikummis had changed all that, his words bending her prodigious mind, letting it achieve its full potential for the first time. Now she stood reborn, and had chosen the new name of Haight. The role of the Annunaki was deeper than she had ever suspected, their tentacles reaching out beyond this simple plane of existence. The things she had seen as Brigid Baptiste had been nothing more than performances on a stage, but Brigid had been too ignorant to think to look past the curtain, beguiled to think that the play was real without ever considering the activity backstage that created the illusion in front of her eyes. Ullikummis had changed that.

Brigid Haight took a deep breath of the icy air as if challenging it to harm her, to make itself felt. Ignorantly, the air remained cold, caring nothing for the affairs of man or Annunaki.

She had come here before in search of a mythical city called Agartha. Buddhist and Taoist legends had spoken of this city, a secret enclave beneath a mountain range on the China-Tibet border from which strange gray people emerged to influence human affairs. In actuality, the city had once housed a race of aliens called the First Folk, among whom a long-lived creature called Balam had been witness to many of the most pivotal points of human history. Balam had befriended the Cerberus team, welcoming them into his underground city that stood all but deserted hundreds of years on from the days when those initial legends had first sprung up. Balam remained in the city even now, living there with his foster daughter, the hybrid spawn known as Little Quav.

It was Little Quav that brought Brigid to Agartha on this occasion under the instructions of her master, the fallen god Ullikummis. The half-human girl child was actually an Annunaki in chrysalis state. The members of the Annunaki royal family had been reborn in hybrid form on Earth, their tweaked DNA hiding their true nature until a catalyst download was applied by their mother ship, Tiamat. The two-and-a-half-year-old child known as Little Quav housed inside her the genetic sequence of the goddess Ninlil, child bride of Enlil and mother to Ullikummis. When the Annunaki, those terrible children of the serpent, had re-emerged on planet Earth, Lord Enlil, the most fearsome of their number, had sought out Little Quav to complete their ghastly pantheon. The Cerberus warriors had protected the child until an agreement could be reached that placed her in the custody of Balam until such time as she came of age. It had been a tentative solution at best, and Balam had been forced to return to hiding with the child so that she would come under no further scrutiny. Ullikummis was determined to bring his mother back to his side in his war against his father—the full nature of his scheme, however, remained unknown. While Ullikummis could not enter the secret city of Agartha without alerting the child’s watchdog, Balam’s longtime ally Brigid should be able to without raising any undue curiosity.

For a moment Brigid stopped, searching the shadow-painted mountains as they towered above her. There was an access point near here, she recalled, a physical entryway that led into the ground itself. Her emerald eyes narrowed as she peered into the darkness, scouring the base of the mountains until she found the place she sought. It was lodged within her eidetic memory, the location still vibrant despite the rudimentary change in the mountains’ snowy covering.

There was something else in her memory, too, appearing for just a fraction of a second as she delved for the hidden location in her mind’s eye—a series of golden circles disappearing into the blue, regular highlights of red and green dotted all around the pattern like a Julia set.

Then, her red-gold hair billowing around her like a lion’s mane, Brigid made her way to a familiar indentation in the snow-covered foothills, her emerald eyes seeking the opening that was hidden in the shade. Her boots slipped for a moment on the shifting snow, and then Brigid had located the path, clambering down to a clump of rocks that waited like sentries, timeless and eternal.

A few months ago the Ontic Library had gifted Brigid knowledge she had never accessed before, and it had opened her mind to new pathways into Agartha, places that had been hidden before. Standing at the hard rock wall, Brigid twisted her leather-sheathed body, and somehow an opening appeared in the wall where there had been none just a moment before. It was not a mechanical thing, nor a supernatural one; it was simply a way of looking for things that Ullikummis had taught her, a way to comprehend the world as the Annunaki did, no longer constrained by just three dimensions.

Brigid stepped into the open mouth of the cave, and found herself in a tunnel, barely five feet in width with a low ceiling, its black basalt walls faintly lit by a ghostly blue luminescence. There was the distinct metronome sound of dripping as snowmelt plip-plopped down into a puddle that pooled along the floor of the tunnel. The puddle itself was so cool that, in turn, the water would freeze again, creating a glistening silvery sheen on its surface like some slug’s midnight trail.

Brigid moved down into the tunnel, descending as it clawed a pathway beneath the surface of the Earth. As she went farther, the rough-walled tunnel opened up and the ceiling became higher overhead, the blue luminescence becoming fainter through its distance from her. Brigid closed her eyes, recalling the map of the area in her prodigious mind’s eye. As she did so, she thought she heard something—a voice—and she stilled her thoughts, filtering through the noises around her, the dripping echoes, until she could be sure. It was a child’s voice, joyful, laughing, awake with the crack of dawn and hungry to live and to play and to experience.

Brigid opened her eyes and moved on down the incline, making her way toward the far exit of the tunnel. After a while, the tunnel widened even more, and then instead of a tunnel it was a chamber in its own right, a vast room whose shape was like a funnel with the narrow tunnel as its spout. High above, stalactites reached down from the ceiling like grasping talons, many of them wider than a man’s body. The child’s laughter was louder now, like a musical instrument being playfully plucked and strum.

It took almost four minutes to stride across the vast cavern before Brigid reached a staircase hewn directly into the rock. The staircase was narrow and without sides, and went down another fifteen feet into a far larger cavern. More of that ghostly blue luminescence spilled from the high, arched roof, tiled here in square light panels like a child’s jigsaw of the sky, with some pieces still waiting to be placed. Beneath, a grand settlement stretched off through the enormous cavern, its squat, windowless buildings carved of the same black basalt as the cavern itself, radiating like the spokes of a wheel from a central tower—yet again, the towering-center-and-lower-surrounds pattern that had repeated itself throughout history. The outskirts of the settlement sloped gently upward to meet with the stone stairwell that Brigid was descending.