God War by James Axler Page A

Balam’s, the talons of her fingers sweeping across the cell bars to rip into his pale flesh. Balam pulled his hand away in surprise, whispering Quav’s name sorrowfully as he did so. There was no recognition in the girl’s uneven eyes, just hate. She was an animal.
    Balam stood in the tunnellike corridor, staring at the cell door with his wide, expressive eyes. He was shaking, Kane saw, just a slight quiver to his shoulders. “A clone,” he confirmed, reading the thing’s mind.
    “Balam,” Kane said slowly, “I want you to step away. Go back down the corridor and wait for me.”
    “Kane, I see no sense in that,” Balam replied. “I am well able to cope with—”
    “Just go down the corridor,” Kane cut him off.
    Wary of further argument, Balam stepped back, making his way to the far end of the corridor. Beside the cell, Kane brought his right hand up, pointing it toward the thing grasping at him through the narrow stone bars. With a practiced flinch of his wrist tendons, the Sin Eater appeared in Kane’s hand for just a second, launching from its hidden wrist holster and striking his palm comfortably, its guardless trigger meeting with Kane’s crooked index finger. A short burst of fire erupted from the muzzle of the gun, filling the corridor for just a moment with the cacophony of gunfire. Then the weapon had returned to its hiding place, and Kane came walking back down the corridor toward Balam.
    At the far end of the corridor, Balam eyed Kane with a faint appreciation. “You killed her. There was no need to do that,” he said.
    “Yes, there was,” Kane told him, his mouth a grim line across his tired face. “There may be more of these things, stillborn clones created to emulate Little Quav. No good can possibly come of cloning her.”
    “I do not believe he was cloning her,” Balam said. “I suspect he was testing the limits of her endurance. That thing had Annunaki traits, as well as hybrid ones. He is looking to catalyze the change.”
    “Test subjects, then.” Kane nodded. “We should stop that.”
    “Kane, the chrysalis wasn’t to grow Quav,” Balam said. “It was to test her cells. Ullikummis must be planning to bring forth his mother, Ninlil, from her genetic template. But to do that would require a genetic factory—it would require Tiamat. ”
    “ Tiamat ’s gone,” Kane dismissed. “I saw it with my own eyes. She blew up in the outer atmosphere.”
    “Things Annunaki seldom die entirely,” Balam warned.
    Kane was thinking faster now, beginning to see the angles involved. “But if Tiamat is alive, then how do we find her? She’s a spaceship and space is pretty big.”
    “We can use the chair,” Balam stated simply.

Chapter 6
    “Where are we, Brigly?” Little Quav asked. She was looking up to Brigid Haight’s ocean-colored eyes as they marched past the pillars of rock that Ullikummis had placed to cordon off the city. All around them, the army of Ullikummis grew from the impossible reaches of the swirling quantum portal, swarming into the deserted city of the dragon.
    Brigid flicked her gaze down to take in the girl properly, seeing her sweet face looking up at her with that strange blend of curiosity and hope in her pale eyes. Brigid had been thinking about the colors hidden in the interphase jump, the sky blue with its golden swirls like lightning, the flecks of green and red hidden in its depths. For a moment, she could see that pattern as if it had been burned into her memory, could feel the serenity those colors seemed to bring. In that moment, she didn’t know hate. In that moment, she was not Haight at all.
    “What is it, child?” Brigid asked, recovering herself to the here, to the now.
    “Where are we, Brigly?” Quav asked once more, looking around her as Ullikummis’s troops hurried past on their way to the dragon’s torso at the core of the dead city.
    Brigid reached down with her free hand, running it gently through Little Quav’s downy hair.