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 mother to the Annunaki race of space gods. More accurately, she was a mother ship, an organic machine that housed the genetic templates of the Annunaki. She had returned to Earth’s orbit several years ago at the start of the twenty-third century, downloading the genetic codes that brought about the Annunaki royal family’s rebirth from their cocoonlike shells as the nine hybrid 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