the glorious future, together we are the heralds of god.
“Each one of you here today is my brother, my sister,” Morrow continued. “Each one of you is a part of the future body, each one of you a building block for eternity.
“We are strong because we are stone!” Morrow shouted, opening the fist he held straight above his head. Revealed within, a rock rested on his palm, just three inches across and dark as a shadow. As the congregation cheered and whooped their support, the rock began to glow, at first faintly in a soft peachy orange, before rapidly becoming brighter until it was burning a lustrous red as rich as lava.
“We are stone,” Morrow chanted, and the people of the congregation took up the chant, shouting their allegiance to the glorious future of Ullikummis.
In Morrow’s hand, the stone glowed brighter still, illuminating the altar where the minister stood, painting his simple robes in rich scarlet and vermilion.
“We are stone,” Morrow called, and a thousand voices echoed the same words back to him. “We are stone.”
As the voices became louder, calling in time with the chiming bell, the air began to change above the minister’s head, poised as he was at the very center of the towering structure. The air seemed to take on a tangibility as a swirl of color began to form, small and faint at first but unmistakably present all the same.
The congregation continued to chant as the swirl above the minister grew bigger and more pronounced. The colors pulsed and swirled, dancing with one another like the aurora borealis, changing as they swam in the air. And somewhere deep in the midst of that multihued pattern, pencil-thin fingers of lightning began to crackle and flash.
Morrow continued to chant, his open hand raised in the air, brandishing the glowing stone like Prometheus bringing fire from the gods. The stone felt hotter now, not burning but like the feel of another person’s skin, lover to lover.
“I am stone.”
The crowd continued to repeat the phrase over and over as the wormhole opened behind their leader, widening like a circular window into the quantum ether.
Unknown to the congregation, all across the country, dozens more of the wormholes were opening as the faithful were called by Ullikummis, a widely scattered flock of believers called into service by their savior.
In Luilekkerville, the hole in space was as tall as a house now, taking up two stories of the cathedral’s innards, poised like a disk in the center of the massive enclosed space, like an eye looking into the infinite. The colors swirled and clashed and witchfire flashed across its depths, the call of Ullikummis echoing from the infinity rent to tug at the souls of the chanting congregation.
Suddenly, Morrow turned to face the expanding circular disk, seeing it properly for the first time where it swirled behind him. His lips continued to mouth the chant—“We are stone”—but the sound died before it left his throat, snatched away by the swirling elemental forces that he was staring into. Minister Morrow looked into the abyss, his human eyes trying to make sense of the fractal patterns of the quantum ether, as he led his congregation into its shining depths. The disk looked like a bruise, blacks and purples and indigo blues all mixing together as it grew larger and larger, a hundred other shades swirling within its tesseract depths.
And if the end of the world had a color, then this was it.
Chapter 2
The spaceship Tiamat was crumbling about them, chunks of its wall plating fracturing away, dropping into the ankle-deep water that seemed to fill every passageway. A man and woman were racing through the curving artery that ran in a loop at the exterior wall of the ship’s hull, and the man carried another figure in his muscular arms. He was much larger than the woman in his arms, and he made the task of carrying her seem effortless as he and his companion sought the makeshift entryway they had blasted in the ship’s hull just a few hours earlier.
Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville who now served the Cerberus operation. He was a huge man in his late thirties, wide-shouldered with skin like polished mahogany. His head was shaved clean, and he wore a trim goatee beard that surrounded his broad mouth in a black circle. His clothes were in disarray, as were those of his companions, and his heavy boots splashed in the water as he leaped over the riblike protrusions that lined the circular-walled corridor. Grant wore a long coat over his shadow suit, both of them made of black fabric, the former fabricated from a Kevlar weave. The shadow suit boasted remarkable properties. Snugly fitting its wearer like a second skin, the one-piece garment had armorlike features sufficient to deflect a blade, redistribute kinetic shock and offer protection from environmental hazards.
Grant continued to run, ducking as another chunk of the walls tumbled away in a crash of shell-like material. “Keep moving,” he instructed his companion, though the command was unnecessary. Perhaps he was really talking to himself, driving himself on as they both hurried toward the rent in the hull through which they might escape this nightmare.
Running just a few paces behind Grant was his companion, a beautiful woman with olive skin and long dark hair that swung behind her in a ponytail. In her early twenties, Rosalia was a mercenary who had recently hooked up with the Cerberus organization during the ongoing Ullikummis infiltration. She had tucked the cuffs of her combat pants into the supple leather boots she wore, kicking out with long legs to keep pace with her taller companion. Her open denim jacket showed the shadow suit she wore beneath, and she had a Ruger P-85 pistol stashed in a low-slung holster on her right hip and a katana sword tucked through her belt loop across the opposing hip. The sword was two feet in length, and the blade had been blackened by flames to the color of charcoal. Rosalia’s chest rose and fell as she took deep breaths to keep up with Grant’s long strides, and her deep brown eyes seemed to burn with rage.
Grant carried another woman in his arms, her petite frame much smaller than Rosalia’s. Her name was Domi and she was an albino, her skin a deathly white, her short hair the creamy color of bone where it framed her sharp-planed face in a pixie cut. Right now her pale flesh was marred with streaks of black where ash had smeared across her skin, and her eyes were closed in slumber. Open, those eyes were a vibrant, satanic red, like two pure rubies. Domi wore simple combat clothes in dark colors, but the clothes had been torn in places following a recent struggle.
As the group reached sight of the hole in the hull of the crumbling spaceship, Grant heard someone calling to him. Up ahead, he saw the familiar form of their other companion—a modern-day samurai warrior called Kudo, who was dressed in supple armor and had a long sword sheath depending from his belt. Kudo was one of the Tigers of Heaven, a group of fearsome warriors who had joined forces with the Cerberus exiles as they defended themselves from the hostile campaign by Ullikummis.
As Grant and Rosalia got closer, they saw that Kudo’s face was streaked red across the left-hand side where something had marred and puckered the skin, and the white of his left eye had turned a chilling bloodred. His dark hair was plastered to his head in short, wet curls.
“What happened to you?” Grant asked as they made their way together to the hole in the ruined hull.
“I mistimed the charge,” Kudo explained wryly before asking about his missing partner, Kishiro.
“He didn’t make it,” Grant admitted solemnly as he ducked through the door-sized hole that an explosive charge had left in the ship’s outer hull.
The ship was grounded. In fact, it had never flown, at least not in its current form. An Annunaki starship of legendary repute, Tiamat had been mistakenly identified in ancient Sumerian mythology as the
