God War by James Axler

infiltrated Edwards’s brain itself,” DeFore reminded them both.
    “We cannot really ever know that unless we cut Edwards open,” Kazuka said. “Something we are loath to do for obvious reasons.”
    When DeFore saw the confusion in Mariah’s face she added quietly, “He’d die.”
    “At the end of the twentieth century,” Kazuka summarized from the computer screen, “this type of surgery was being explored as an alternative to radiation treatments for cancer. The precision of the technique—if applied correctly—is its strength.”
    The room fell silent for a moment as the three highly educated people considered the moral dilemma they faced.
    “You just need to make a decision, don’t you?” Mariah said.
    “I don’t like it,” DeFore said. “We run the risk of permanently scrambling Edwards’s brain, turning him into a vegetable or worse, killing him.” She turned to Kazuka.
    “Better to act than to do nothing,” Kazuka said. “I vote yes, we perform the surgery.”
    The two doctors turned to Mariah.
    “You have the deciding vote, Mariah,” DeFore said gently.
    “No,” Mariah said. “I’m not a doctor. You guys should—” She stopped when she saw the haunted look in DeFore’s eyes. She remembered Clem lying there, his skull crushed, remembered what had happened to her in Tenth City, when she had been shot in the leg to save her from killing herself by walking into the flames of a crematorium on the instructions of Ullikummis, whose brutal words had seemed to pierce her very skull. She took a deep breath, forcing the welling emotions aside.
    “When Ullikummis first landed,” Mariah began, “I had his thoughts forced on me, overlaying my own. I imagine it was a lot like the way the obedience stone is affecting Edwards, a prototype, if you will.
    “I remember how that felt,” Mariah continued solemnly, “the way it felt to have my own thoughts
obliterated by the thoughts of someone else. Some thing alien. So, I vote yes to the surgery, because if it does kill Edwards—who is my respected colleague and my friend—then death wouldn’t be so bad. Death would be a release.”
    The two doctors nodded, accepting Mariah’s impassioned speech. They would operate. Mariah—a geologist and not a medical doctor—only hoped she had made the right decision, because it was one she would have to live with for the rest of her life.
    * * *
    “W HAT IS IT ?” B ALAM ASKED .
    “Tell me, Balam,” Kane said, avoiding the question, “can the Annunaki clone living things? Humans, say, or hybrids?”
    “Their bodies are clone bodies,” Balam said with that superior logic he often employed. “When you met with Enlil and his brethren, you were not looking on the same flesh that walked this planet thousands of years ago. You merely looked at things reborn, perfect copies. Clones by another name.”
    Kane stepped aside, letting Balam see into the cell for the first time. “I think he cloned her, or tried to,” he warned.
    Balam looked at the thing in the cell, and his face became a stony mask. “Scales,” was all he said.
    Kane looked back at the girl in the cell, aware now that his heart was drumming a tarantella against his chest. He willed it to slow, recalling the breathing exercises he had been taught when he had trained as a Magistrate in Cobaltville. The thing in the cell stared at him plaintively before baring her teeth and hissing once again. The teeth were thin and sharp like needles, and they faced inward, cutting into her mouth.
    Quav.
    Balam was nodding, as if reading Kane’s thoughts. The thing in the cell was his foster daughter, or at least an approximation of her based on a flawed genetic template. She had been changed, twisted, turned into the Annunaki form she might one day blossom into.
    Balam reached through the stony bars of the cell, the six long fingers of his hand shaking just slightly as he went to touch the girl.
    The girl-thing in the cell hissed, flinging her hands at