God War by James Axler Page A

much as a word. It was quite something to behold.
    The stone giant stood on a hillock by the river, a raised mound of dirt beside the rippling surface. Brigid stood beside him, her red-gold hair shimmering with the sunlight, clutching the hand of the little girl in the indigo dress.
    “Behold the tools of the future,” Ullikummis said, his voice carrying across the burgeoning group of arrivals. He indicated the dragon shape that stood behind him, its arrow-shaped head looming high above, his voice echoing through the abandoned streets. “Here is Tiamat, the engine that will change the world. Here is your future, waiting to be freed from terrible bondage.
    “Will you stand with me as I free Tiamat? ”
    The crowd cheered in response, hanging on Ullikummis’s every word.
    “Will you embrace the future for the betterment of all?”
    Again the crowd cheered.
    “Onward, bearers of the future,” Ullikummis yelled, “onward to utopia.”
    With that, the stone god turned and began to stride toward the outskirts of the dragon city, his tree-trunk-like feet stomping against the sandy soil in brutal, punishing blows. Brigid Haight strode with him, hurrying little Quav along at her side, the army of two thousand or more following briskly in their wake.
    The people could not imagine how the wars of the Annunaki were to be fought. All they knew was what they saw: here was a leader who led, not a general who hid behind his troops as they went into battle.
    Ullikummis spread out his hands, and the ground began to shake, a tremor running through it deep below the surface.
    Holding his Sin Eater ready as he crouched atop of the chalk-white roof, Grant felt that tremor rock through his boots and against his knees, pounding deep through his body like a low bass note.
    “The hell is that?” Grant muttered.
    Before Rosalia could answer, something began to change beyond the edges of Tiamat ’s broad wings. Those wings stretched out for eight miles, a huge structure that dominated the landscape. Now, around the outskirts, the ground rumbled and split as sharp prongs of stone were pulled from the soil, ripped from the bedrock itself to form a spiky cage around the perimeter of the spaceship. The prongs pointed into the air, their sharp tips climbing twelve feet into the sky like eerie monuments. More spikes tore through the ground as Ullikummis passed, and Grant watched as they spread out from where he was walking, new prongs jutting from the soil at an increasingly greater distance from where the stone god stepped.
    “What is he doing?” Grant whispered.
    “The same thing he did at Cerberus,” Rosalia replied. “Creating a lockdown.”
    As she said it, the jutting columns began to dwindle, and those farthest from Ullikummis appeared much shorter, some just two or three feet in height. From their high vantage point, Grant and Rosalia could see that the pointed columns did not wrap around the whole of the grounded spaceship but instead ran in a crescent shape around this, the southwest quarter. Even so, the bowed line of spikes took in almost a mile in its length, a vast line of bars caging in the spaceship where she waited poised on the soil.
    Behind the Cerberus warriors, the citylike form of Tiamat waited in silence, never acknowledging the barricade that had been erected before her. Though she looked like a city, the streets and buildings had been left vacant, a ghost town on the banks of the river. Every person who had stepped into the city had disappeared, abducted by its lone ruler, the Annunaki Overlord Enlil. But now Enlil was gone— wasn’t he?— and Ullikummis had arrived to take control of the genetic factory womb that Tiamat contained, his first bold step in reordering the world.
    “We have to stop him,” Grant blurted, scrambling back toward the area of the rooftop that dropped to the staircase.
    Rosalia grabbed his arm, pulling the ex-Mag up short. “Are you insane, Grant? There are probably two thousand people