“Look at me,” Enlil insisted, biting the words through clenched teeth. “I am your master.”
In response, the blue-scaled Annunaki hissed defiantly, spitting a glob of saliva into Enlil’s face. With a swift twist of his hands, Enlil snapped the creature’s neck, tossing her aside like so much worthless trash. They were not true Annunaki, Enlil sneered; killing them was easy. More than two hundred of the possessed bodies surrounded him, Enlil saw, and he struggled to his feet where a stream of water sparkled past him.
“I gave life unto you,” Enlil insisted, his tattered cloak swirling about him as he turned to face each of the slave class, piercing them with his indomitable gaze. “Tiamat is your mother, but I fathered you.”
He searched the crowd, eyes meeting and passing the glaring eyes of more than two hundred creatures who had spent millennia waiting for payback. Overhead, another great chunk of the ceiling peeled away like skin and crashed down, electricity playing across it like witchfire as it slammed to the plate floor behind the Annunaki forms.
“I am your master,” Enlil reminded them. “Without me, you are nothing, simply purposeless creatures.”
As one, the Igigi stepped toward Enlil, their minds working in unison, bringing their final, brutal judgment on this monster who had once ruled them. They were in uni-thought, the shared horror of spending over three thousand years without bodies creating a kind of melded mind, frayed and blurred, no longer able to differentiate between individuals.
Enlil’s shoulders shook as he struggled for breath, the exertions of this battle so soon after he had fought with Grant and his Cerberus colleagues draining his inner resources. Once again, lightning flashed overhead, lancing across the ceiling like a white-hot claw.
“I am Enlil,” the overlord stated. “Enlil the destroyer. The one known as Dagon, as Kumbari, as the Imperator. A hundred names for a million peoples, and every one of those peoples obeyed me.”
As one, the Igigi in their Annunaki shells took another menacing step toward Enlil, blocking him off on all sides, caging him in place.
Enlil glared at them, the power of his will lancing through his eyes like the hypnotic stare of the cobra. “You will obey me,” he told them, his voice firm despite his panting breath.
As one, the Igigi took another tentative step forward. And then, as one, they stopped.
Enlil turned to survey them, his gaze falling upon each in turn as more than two hundred lesser beings stood all around him, awaiting his orders once more. They had turned on him for a moment, three thousand years of torment twisting their minds, making them believe perhaps that they were his betters. But he was the overlord.
“Now,” Enlil breathed ominously, “we have work yet to do.”
Above, a triple flash of lightning hurtled across the ceiling of Tiamat’s birthing chamber, lancing down and destroying another clump of the birth pods that had been used to grow new bodies for the Annunaki. It didn’t matter. The Igigi would do.
Enlil had his army, eternally obedient. He was overlord for a reason.
* * *
GRANT’S TEAM rushed through the bone city of the dragon, the empty streets echoing with their footsteps. As they ran, Grant engaged his Commtact, a hidden radio transceiver that was used to communicate with his colleagues in the field and back at Cerberus headquarters. Most of the members of the Cerberus field teams had a surgically embedded Commtact. The subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communications unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts operated via sensor circuitry, incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in each subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory canals, and dermal sensors transmitted the electronic signals directly through the skull casing, vibrating the ear canal. In theory, even a completely deaf user would still be able to hear, after a fashion, courtesy of the Commtact device. Commtacts also functioned as real-time translation devices, providing they had enough raw vocabulary from a language programmed into their processor, and because they were directly connected to the body of the user, could amplify speech no matter how quiet.
“Encrypt alpha-niner,” Grant murmured as he brought the Commtact to life, engaging the encryption protocols that had been added to the system over the past six weeks. “Cerberus, this is Grant.”
There was a pause while Grant waited for one of his faraway colleagues to respond. The voice that came back was that of Donald Bry, a man who was loosely considered the second in command of the Cerberus operation and whose voice, like his manner, seemed ever fraught with worry. “Go ahead, Grant.”
“Have just exited Tiamat,” Grant explained. “Making our way out of the ville now. Kishiro didn’t make it and we have wounded.”
“How many?” Bry asked over the Commtact, his voice emotionless and professional now.
“Kudo took a face full of explosive,” Grant explained, “and Domi’s out of it right now. I want her checked over as soon as she wakes up. She’s been through a shitload of trauma.”
Still running, Grant turned to Rosalia with a raised eyebrow. “Rosie? Anything you want to add?”
“I can look after myself,” the dark-haired mercenary said dismissively. “You worry about your people, Magistrate.”
Unlike Grant, Rosalia had only served with Cerberus briefly. She valued her independence, and there had been no time for her to have the minor surgery necessary to implant a Commtact receiver, even had she agreed to it. Grant eyeballed her a moment longer before relating her response back to Bry. Dark streaks of ash and soot marred her otherwise beautiful features, and her clothes were ripped in places, but otherwise she seemed fine.
“We lost our transport,” Grant continued, speaking into his Commtact, “so we’re going to need an exit strategy. You have anything showing, Donald?”
The Cerberus organization favored several specific methods for transporting their personnel over vast
distances. Although its staff frequently utilized air and ground vehicles, the operation itself had taken its name from a twentieth-century military project devoted to a teleportation system that relied on mat-trans units. More recently, Cerberus had applied that knowledge to the alien design of the interphaser, accessing parallax points to transport staff across the globe and beyond.
“Scanning for mat-trans locations now,” Bry assured Grant.
“Stay on it,” Grant acknowledged. “We’re maybe fifteen minutes from city limits yet.”
With that the communication broke off at Grant’s command.
* * *
SOMEWHERE ON THE West Coast of what had historically been known as the United States of America, Cerberus operator Donald Bry was flipping through computer screen data trying to find a suitable exit point for Grant and his team. Until recently, the Cerberus headquarters had been located in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. However, following the devastating attack by Ullikummis, the redoubt had been evacuated, and the core personnel had taken up temporary residence on the West Coast. For the moment, Cerberus was much diminished while it struggled to recover, many of its surviving staff forced into hiding.
Bry was a slender man with an unruly mop of copper curls and an expression that ranged from worried to fearful. He was a man given to stressing over a given situation, be it the health of his operatives or simply what the best filling would be for his lunchtime sandwich. He was, however, a remarkable computer expert whose dedication to his job made him an irreplaceable asset to the Cerberus organization.
Bry sat amid a bank of laptops, each wired through a mainframe to boost their