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.
When Ullikummis and his army had neared the Cerberus redoubt, utilizing folded space to evade many of the surveillance systems, his presence had triggered the hidden stones that lurked in several of the personnel within, among them Edwards of the bullet-bitten ear, resulting in the whole team’s incarceration in Life Camp Zero, a claustrophobic prison carved out of rock. While the Cerberus team had ultimately managed to overpower their jailers, one final revelation remained: the warrenlike Life Camp Zero was in fact the Cerberus redoubt, altered almost beyond recognition by the rock-shaping abilities of Ullikummis. The once-proud military base had been rendered unusable by the manipulations of the stone god, and the remaining Cerberus personnel had been forced to flee, dispersing into small groups and hiding themselves across the country as they struggled to survive in a world turned against them. Beyond the walls of the redoubt, the Cerberus warriors found the cult of Ullikummis had grown at an alarming rate, and though they could not possibly know the exact figures, the loyal subjects who would now lay their lives down for their Annunaki master numbered over one million.
It had only been in the past week that Lakesh had begun to establish this new, temporary headquarters for the Cerberus operation. This facility was in actuality an embassy for the Tigers of Heaven, a warrior class operating out of New Edo in the Pacific. The Tigers’ leader, Shizuka, was a longtime ally of the Cerberus team, and she had graciously donated the manse for the duration of the Cerberus team’s exile from their own headquarters, providing what additional equipment she could and granting the team the added security of a squadron of her own fearsome warriors, the samurai-like Tigers of Heaven themselves.
Thus it was that the director of Cerberus, Mohandas Lakesh Singh, now found himself standing in the hastily established monitoring suite of the CAT scanner, watching the multicolored brain maps appear as the scan carved its invisible path through Edwards’s skull. A cyberneticist and physicist by training, Lakesh appeared to be in his mid-fifties, with dusky skin and a well-built body. His high brow and piercing blue eyes gave clear indication of his vast intelligence, while his aquiline nose and small, refined mouth suggested a man of culture, as well as scientific learning. Lakesh’s dark hair was brushed back from his face, streaks of white peppering the wisps that ran at his temples and over his ears. While Lakesh, as he was affectionately known, looked to be about fifty-five, he was in fact closer to five times that age; he had been born in the middle of the twentieth century and had worked as a scientist on various military projects, including the development of the mat-trans system of teleportation. Through cryogenic suspension and a program of organ replacement, Lakesh had survived to his 250th birthday. Most recently, an encounter with a Quad V hybrid called Priscilla had regenerated Lakesh’s ailing body, fixing him at the physical age he now appeared.
Lakesh wore
