head itself seemed ugly, misshapen, its ridges hard and uneven. Formed of rock like the rest of him, Ullikummis’s was the face of nightmare, dark stone eroded by weather rather than carved with the delicacy of a statue. A slash of mouth waited grimly beneath a flattened nose, twin eyes burning with magma like pits beneath a thick brow. Humanoid in form, the creature known as Ullikummis was entirely hairless.
He stood in the doorway, the familiar charcoallike muster of his body wafting to Brigid’s nostrils as he waited there, so tall he dominated the room before he had fully entered. A child stood before him, a girl no more than three years old, her long, wispy hair reaching midway down her back in feathery waves of a blond so pale it was almost white. She wore a simple dress, its creamy yellow somehow enhancing the paleness of her skin. The girl was called Quavell or Quav, named after her mother, and she was a hybrid of human and alien DNA. But Ullikummis called her only by her true name, the name of the programmed template hidden within her genetic code—Ninlil, the name of his mother. He stood now with his stone-clad hands resting gently on the girl’s shoulders, protective, possessive.
Seeing Brigid’s confusion, Ullikummis spoke again, his voice rumbling like the grinding stones of a mill. “You seem ill at ease, my hand in darkness.”
Brigid shook her head momentarily, willing the feeling of sleep from her body. “I dreamed of shapes...” she muttered, “colors.” Her words seemed confused, as if she was trying to describe a thing just out of sight.
She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, with porcelain skin and vibrant red hair that ran down her back in a cascade of tangled curls. Twin emerald orbs peered from beneath dark makeup that had been smeared like a black shadow across her eyes. Her full lips were darkened to the harsh purple of a bruise, and her cheeks seemed narrow and drawn. While those full lips invoked a tender, sultry side, her high forehead hinted at her formidable intelligence. Brigid pushed the blanket away from her naked body, revealing the trim, slender form of a trained athlete, strong but remaining enviably feminine.
They were inside a sea fortress off the East Coast of North America. The fortress had been named Bensalem by its originator Ullikummis, who had drawn it alone from the depths of the ocean stone by stone, shaping it with the power of his formidable will the way a sculptress might carve a pot. The placement of the fortress had been paramount, sitting atop a hidden parallax point—one of a network of nodes across the globe that served to function as access points for a teleportational system.
Brigid’s room itself was small and cold with a narrow opening in its stone wall that served as a window. Through this, she could hear the waves crashing against the high stone sides of the island fortress, feel the billowing breeze from the ocean and smell its briny aroma as the sun rose. The walls of the room were hard rock, rough and unfinished as if a cliff face had been sheared away. Embedded within those walls, faint lines of
orange-red glowed in jagged rents, each no wider than half an inch and splayed across the walls like the shards of a shattered windshield. Throbbing and pulsing, those orange rents seemed uncannily alive.
As Brigid shrugged aside her covers, feeling the cold dawn air on her skin, Ullikummis spoke again in that voice like grinding millstones. “The stars are aligned,” he said. “The day is upon us.”
Her body revealed, there were bruises there, too, circles in the deepest purples and blues as if her mouth had been made up in sympathy. The white-blond girl, Little Quav, trotted across the room to Brigid as she pulled herself from the bunk, an innocent smile in her eyes. The girl tottered a little, neither walking nor running but instead a kind of combination of the two as she hurried over to Brigid’s arms. “Brigly,” she said, excitement in her voice.
Brigid held her arms open, encircling the girl as she sat at the edge of the bunk. The hybrid girl felt warm as she pressed against Brigid’s breasts.
“Good morning, munchkin,” Brigid said. The epithet seemed strange to her, distant, like something made of mist.
The girl had been with them for six days now. Though fearless, she had cast Brigid as a mother figure in the echoing stone fortress. That was only natural; to an extent, Brigid had been a mother to her since her birth almost three years earlier. Little Quav’s hybrid mother had died shortly after childbirth, leaving the child orphaned. A key player in the genetic arms race between humans and Annunaki, Quav had been in danger from the very moment of her birth. For her own safety, the hybrid child was entrusted into the foster care of Balam, the last of a race known as the First Folk. For the past few years, Balam had raised the child as his own in the abandoned city of Agartha, hidden deep beneath the Altyn Tagh region of Tibet. However, as she had become older and hence more self-aware, the outwardly human Quav had begun to question the obvious differences between herself and her foster father. She had delighted in the few contacts she had had with people, understandably feeling a kind of instant kinship with them after her time with Balam. Brigid had been one of those people; she and Quav had met on brief occasions where the girl had formed her attachment. Haight had been known by another name then, however—her birth name of Brigid Baptiste, and she had worked for the Cerberus organization tasked with the protection of humanity from the alien machinations of the insidious race called the Annunaki.
The Annunaki were a race of aliens who had first visited Earth many millennia ago, back when humankind was still hiding in trees from saber-toothed tigers. With their strange, reptilian appearance and incredible technology, the Annunaki had been mistaken for gods by the primitive local populace, an error that they had reveled in, encouraging their worship as false idols, and they constructed their vast golden cities of Eridu, Nippur, Babylon and others on the virgin soils of Earth. Though hailed in Sumerian mythology as gods, the Annunaki themselves were in fact a near-immortal race from the planet Nibiru, whose group memories were passed on—complete—to their descendants and the others of their race. By the time they arrived on Earth, the Annunaki had become bored with their lives, gripped by a self-destructive ennui engendered by the nature of their vast shared memories. With no individual experience in living memory, it was hoped that the conquering of this new planet would stave off the crushing boredom of their lives—and for a time it had. Here were new territories to control, new creatures to toy with and experiment on. For a while, the gods had warred, battling for territory, for supremacy, for the adulation of the primitives that littered the planet all about them. But finally—perhaps, inevitably—they had become bored with their new playthings, and Overlord Enlil, the cruelest of their number and the master of the city of Nippur, had unleashed a great torrent to wipe the planet of the scourge of humankind like a spoiled child tossing aside his toys. This torrent had been enshrined in man’s history under various names, most notably as the Great Flood of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Enlil’s plot failed thanks to the deceptions of his own brother, Enki, and the Great Flood did not wipe humankind from the face of the planet. Thus, while the Annunaki retreated into the shadows, humanity flourished. For the subsequent four thousand years, humanity reigned until, on January 20, 2001, a devastating nuclear holocaust had been unleashed by the antagonistic powers of East and West. This war, and the subsequent Deathlands era of privation that followed, had in fact been part of a long-term plan by the Annunaki to reassert their own dominance over the indigenous race, thinning the herd before reemerging two hundred years after the nukecaust to finally take their place as rulers of the world. That audacious plan had involved the creation of artificially evolved bodies in the forms of the hybrid barons, of whom Little Quav was the ultimate progeny. Each of these hybrids had been prepped to accept a genetic download from the starship Tiamat, literally a mother ship for the Annunaki.
However, once the nine barons had been reborn in their original, lizardlike forms as the royal family of the Annunaki, old rivalries and prejudices had rapidly emerged, and the nine overlords were soon at war with one another for ultimate control of the territories once more. Stuck between the factions, a plucky group of human adventurers working together under the banner of Cerberus managed to turn the Annunaki’s plans back
