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.”
* * *
D EEP 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 into the vast room, spewing out lightninglike shards of electricity toward the arched ceiling high above, illuminating the room in violent staccato bursts. Swathes of the roof were falling away in great chunks, crashing to the
Nikita Storm, Bessie Hucow, Mystique Vixen