Truth Engine by James Axler Page A

pondered their next move, the ground around them began to shake, and the rock walls seemed to rattle in place.
    Grant stumbled away from the wall he stood by with Domi. “What th—?”
    â€œEarthquake?” Domi suggested, though she didn’t sound so sure. It would be the first time the Cerberus redoubt had been struck by such a thing.
    Brigid’s breath caught in her throat as she saw another figure looming just beyond the redoubt’s wide entrance. It was the unmistakable figure of the would-be stone god, Ullikummis, the Annunaki prince she had met and challenged twice before.
    As Ullikummis stood there, arms spread before him, pillars of stone emerged from the ground, clambering out of the soil at the redoubt’s entrance like living things,twisting and spiraling upward as they stretched toward the sky. Each rough-sided pillar was four feet in diameter, and they seemed to surge out of the ground like launching missiles, kicking up dust as everything about them shook.
    Brigid, Kane, Grant and Domi watched in astonishment as the pillars continued to grow, reaching higher than the top of the redoubt door, beyond where the Cerberus warriors could see. In their previous meeting in Tenth City, all four had witnessed Ullikummis’s ability to somehow control stone, exhibiting a kind of psionic talent to command the rocks and stones about him. On that occasion, the stone-clad Annunaki had moved a wall into Brigid’s path as she had tried to escape, drawing it from the ground like a gate.
    Beyond the shaking pillars, Brigid saw the overcast skies, gray with rain-heavy clouds, and she spotted two fast-moving objects whip across the clouds, accompanied by the familiar sound of engines cutting through the air.
    â€œThey have the Mantas,” Brigid stated, unable to suppress the shock in her voice.
    The Mantas were sleek bronze aircraft with a wing-span of twenty yards and a body length of almost fifteen feet. They looked like the seagoing manta rays they were named for, and the beauty of their alien design was breathtaking, combining the principles of aerodynamics in a gleaming burnt-gold finish, streaking across the skies beyond the edge of the mountaintop redoubt. They appeared to be flattened wedges with graceful wings curving out from their bodies, an elongated hump in the center of the craft providing the only evidence of a cockpit. Finished in a coppery hue, the surface of each craft was decorated with curious geometric designs, elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiralsymbols that covered the entire aircraft. Transatmospheric and subspace vehicles, the Mantas were used by the Cerberus team for long-range missions. They were alien vessels that had been left discarded on Earth for millennia and were discovered by Kane and Grant during one of their exploratory missions. But the twin crafts should have been safely stored in the redoubt’s hangar. No one else should have been able to access and fly them. And yet here they were.
    The Cerberus teammates watched as the two ships zipped through the air past the shuddering pillars, disappearing from view before looping back a few seconds later.
    â€œThey’re running a surveillance pattern,” Grant growled, watching the Mantas flit past the open door again.
    â€œKeeping an eye out for stragglers, perhaps,” Brigid proposed.
    â€œNo escape,” Domi declared. “Stuck here.”
    Kane turned to the others. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, addressing Domi’s point. “I was never one to run, and am not about to start now.”
    â€œWe have to stop Ullikummis,” Brigid stated, the words tumbling from her mouth in a rush. “Now. We have to do it now.”
    Kane’s eyes were fixed on the spectacle outside as the stone pillars locked into place around the entrance, like iron bars on a prison window. “Yeah, but how?” he spit. “Answer me that, Baptiste, and