barons, but had later self-destructed in an explosion that rocked the skies. Grant had been there when the destruct order had been given, and he had watched from the porthole of a fleeing lifeboat as Tiamat went up in flames.
However, the spacecraft had reappeared just a few weeks before on the banks of the River Euphrates, Iraq, her familiar dragon shape towering over an empty city formed of her skeletal wings. Grant had no possible way of knowing, but the ship had been grown from a seed planted by Enlil, the cruelest of the Annunaki overlords. Enlil had tapped the ship’s incredible reservoir of knowledge to fast-track an army of Annunaki, warping the DNA of any human who came close to the skeletal city. However, something had been wrong deep within the codes of Tiamat herself, and the ship was now deteriorating at an incredible rate, falling apart as its huge water tanks bled out.
Outside, the sun sat high in the sky, its midmorning burn pounding warmly against Grant’s skin.
“We should destroy it,” Kudo insisted, staring angrily back at the shovel-shaped head of the spaceship that rested on the riverbank.
“We don’t have anything that can do that,” Grant told him as Rosalia emerged from the raw-edged hole in the hull, “but we can come back. Bomb the wicked thing out of existence once and for all.”
* * *
DEEP INSIDE the dragon-form ship, deep in the belly of the beast, Enlil was fighting for his life.
Enlil, a high-ranking member of Annunaki royalty, and self-styled overlord of the human race, was a beautiful creature. He stood over six feet tall, with a crest of spines atop his head that added almost a foot to his already impressive height. His scaled skin was the color of gold dipped in blood, of sunset in the tropics, and it covered his muscular body like a suit of malleable armor. His chest and arms were bare, as were his clawed feet, while his legs were covered in loose, billowing breeks. Other than that, Enlil wore a bloodred cloak cinched around his shoulders that trailed down to brush at the tops of his ankles. The cloak was torn, for it had suffered during the current struggle with his enemies.
His enemies were even now swarming at him from all sides, like a cloud of insects attacking an intruder. Naked, it was clear that each of them came from the same race as Enlil, their muscular lizard bodies moving with the same eerie grace that characterized the overlord’s gestures. They were adult Annunaki, full-grown yet they had only just come to life. The experiment engineered by Overlord Enlil had backfired terribly in the final moments thanks to the intervention of the Cerberus crew. The Annunaki had been grown in the vats of Tiamat, twisted around the DNA templates of trapped human bodies to create a new pantheon of Annunaki space gods. Even now, their egglike birthing pods stood silently around the scene of carnage, lining the sides of the vast room where streams of water burbled and catwalks grown from bone ran overhead.
Ill lit, the room was approximately the size of two football fields, with railless stairwells dotted around, each reaching up to the second level where the catwalks ran. To one side, a burning column belched smoke into the vast room, spewing out lightninglike shards of electricity toward the arched ceiling high above, illuminating the room in violent staccato bursts. Swathes of the roof were falling away in great chunks, crashing to the floor in explosions of dust and water.
And amid all of this, Enlil was struggling with the reborn forms of the Annunaki. There were 213 of them in all. Each one was unique, some male, some female, their scales a rainbow of achingly beautiful colors shimmering in the half-light that ebbed through the birthing chamber. Some had spines across their brows like Enlil’s, while others featured a crown of bony protrusions around their skulls.
Believing himself to be the last survivor of his race, Enlil had grown these bodies to re-create the glory of the Age of the Annunaki, who had ruled the Earth more than five thousand years before. Prior to Enlil’s experimentation, the rebirth of the Annunaki had involved a slow procedure of growing hybrid bodies that could accommodate the genetic changes needed to transform, chrysalis-like, into their Annunaki final form. Enlil had altered that, utilizing a much quicker—though far more traumatic—process to skip a step and change the basic human template into one suitable for the Annunaki. His plans had been interrupted by Grant, Domi, Rosalia and Kudo, and the waiting bodies had been awoken too soon, their memory downloads incomplete. In place of the memories of his brethren, Enlil found that an unexpected third party had been at play, prepped to snatch the bodies for their own. This group were the Igigi, the one-time slave caste of the Annunaki who were recorded in legend as “those who watch and see.” Without doubt, the Igigi had “watched and seen” the moment to finally strike against their one-time master.
According to Sumerian myth, there had been one thousand Igigi who served the Annunaki, and each one was considered to be a god by the human populace. However, their role had been to facilitate the day-to-day running of the Annunaki empire on Earth, and they had never achieved names. When Enlil had unleashed the Great Flood to cleanse the Earth of the human race, he had dismissed the Igigi, leaving them to drown as nothing more than collateral damage. But a group of rebellious Igigi had been wise to his plan and had hidden their memories in a shadow box until such time as they had bodies that could house them once more. When Enlil had generated this new army of Annunaki gods, the Igigi had seized their chance and now their souls occupied the Annunaki shells in place of the planned downloads. Now 213 fiercely powerful bodies had turned on the Annunaki overlord who had tried to extinguish them many millennia ago—213 angry souls.
Enlil had been knocked down to the floor by their vicious attacks, and more of the Igigi-possessed
Annunaki swarmed on him, kicking and punching him from all sides as he lay on his back. A mound of bodies pressed against him, crushing Enlil to the floor by the sheer weight of numbers. At the bottom of that mound, Enlil was struggling for breath as five or six strong Annunaki bodies crushed against his chest, clawed hands grasping for his throat, reaching for his eyes.
Then, with an almighty effort, Enlil flinched his body, sharp and sudden, and three of the monstrous forms were thrust away from him, careering into the canal streams that filtered across the room.
Enlil shoved upward with both hands, pushing two more of the figures away even as more attackers neared.
“Get away,” Enlil snarled, batting at a clawed foot as it swung at his face.
The kicker lost his balance, toppling back as Enlil twisted his grip. As he did so, another Annunaki drove a heel into Enlil’s flank, driving the breath from his lungs as he rolled across the hard floor.
Enlil sprawled on his face, his scarlet cloak in disarray about him. There was water here—a shallow channel that ran the length of the room. Four feet wide, it was used to transport items across the vast distance of the chamber. Enlil felt the water’s coolness lash against his face, reviving him instantaneously as the Annunaki figures stalked toward him, the sharp claws of their feet clacking against the bonelike tiling in a rising drumbeat of hate.
Enlil pushed himself up, assuming a crouching position. Lightning ripped across the ceiling of the chamber, echoing with such fury that he could feel its pressure drum across his chest. Behind him, a blast of that wild electricity slammed against a stack of the cylindrical birthing pods and they burst into flame. Enlil felt the heat against his back as he watched the milling crowd of reborn Annunaki. Every eye was on him, and every pair of eyes showed the unrestrained fury that welled within. He had betrayed these Igigi, these slaves, betrayed them without a thought, casting them aside as if they meant nothing. But he was a god. Was this not his right?
“Get back, damn you,” Enlil spit as the Igigi moved in on him. “I am your lord...your master...”
Enlil’s words trailed off as another of the furious Igigi leaped at him, swiping at his face with a salmon-scaled hand that ended
