James Axler - God War

“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.