Cradle Of Destiny

“Boring as any other day.” Bry’s voice reverberated through his skull. “Well, most other days. Why? Afraid we’d call you back home?”

“Yeah,” Grant answered.

“Both Lakesh and Kane have threatened me in their usual manners if I pull you from home too soon,” Bry answered.

Home, Grant thought. That’s what this tiny island remnant of the sunken West Coast of the United States had become to him. New Edo and its neighbor, Thunder Isle, were among the new archipelago that had formed in the wake of the nuclear holocaust that nearly drove humankind into extinction on January 21, 2001. Powerful earthshaker bombs had shattered California, dumping entire cities into the Pacific Ocean, utilizing the instability of the San Andreas Fault to wreak havoc. While the nuclear war was primarily between the United States and the Soviet Union, the conflict had been touched off by an incarnation of the Annunaki god-king Enlil, then disguised as Colonel Thrush.

How many billions had been scoured from the face of the Earth, literally by the hand of their greatest enemy? With the arming of a bomb placed in the basement of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., Thrush/Enlil had ushered in an age where the hidden and sleeping Annunaki overlords could awaken and recast the planet as their renewed jewel, as it had been millennia past.

This was history that had been drummed into Grant, so much that it came unbidden just as he thought of the island where his true love resided. A turmoil of those memories could flood unbidden if he couldn’t pre occupy himself. Right now, though, even the splendor of his unclad lover, flexing her taut, beautiful body in the near-poetic dance of martial arts katas, wasn’t enough of a distraction.

“Grant?” Bry asked. “You all right?”

“Yeah,” Grant answered. He regretted using Shizuka as an excuse, but there was no other way to explain his inattention. “Just admiring the view this morning….”

“Say hi to Shizuka for me,” Bry said. “I’d say give her a kiss…”

“But I already got to that,” Grant concluded, trying to inject some lightness into his tone. He wished he could feel that bit of joy he’d fabricated.

“Kane says get to it some more,” Bry added. “His orders.”

“Since when is Kane my boss?” Grant asked.

“He figures that this will be his only chance to order you to do something and have you do it gladly,” Bry answered. “Forget the world for a while, okay?”

Grant nodded, then winced as he realized the motion was useless over the Commtact. “I’ll try.”

Shizuka appeared at his shoulder, and she put her head against Grant’s, skull-to-skull contact allowing her words to be heard, as well. “Grant will have some help.”

Bry laughed.

It was something that Grant hoped that he would remember how to do.

THE FERAL ALBINO outlander known as Domi swept her ruby-red eyes across the empty, desolate shores of the Euphrates River. They were dozens of miles from the nearest large settlement, and on this part of the mighty thoroughfare, there was no gradual drop-off to the water, no beaches. There was a six-foot miniature cliff on either side of the flowing river.

It was a lonely, desolate place where there was no irrigation, so vegetation was sparse, no different from the desert wilderness back in America. It was at once familiar visually, but alien in terms of scents, the feel of the sun’s heat beating down on her shadow suit’s shoulders. Domi was a small woman, just under five feet in height, but her body was athletically sculpted, muscles coiled like cables around her lean limbs. The black sheen of the high-tech shadow suit poking out from under her cargo shorts and multipocketed vest made her arms and legs seem sticklike where they poked out.

Given that she had accompanied Kane, Grant and Brigid Baptiste from the depths of Africa to the Moon itself, Domi knew the likelihood of running into an environment that would require the suit’s protective qualities. Also, even after two centuries, radioactive wastelands were not uncommon. Radiation poisoning was something that Domi had been lucky enough to avoid during her brief, hard-fought life. She wasn’t about to endanger that successful run by not taking the proper precautions.

Those precautions included a foot-long fighting knife worn in a cross-draw scabbard that hung off the belt of her cargo shorts, and the small but powerful Detonics .45-caliber automatic in a holster on her opposite hip. Backing it up was a steel-tube-framed crossbow that hung, folded on a sling, from her shoulder. Raised in the Outlands, Domi didn’t need much more than a knife to sustain herself, but the crossbow was good for hunting and the little handgun had evened the odds in countless battles.

More equalization came in the form of Edwards, a tall and broad-shouldered former Magistrate who had been recruited to the Cerberus cause with the fall of the nine baronies. The blunt-headed man stood at the other end of the small expedition. Edwards was a beast of a man, nearly as tall as Grant, but stocky and bulky, not long limbed and well proportioned by the man who often served as her surrogate father.

Edwards, like all Magistrates, had been given only one name by the hybrid barons, who once ruled the baronies before their evolution into overlords. Their singular appellations combined with the grim, black carapace-like armor to separate them from the rest of the barons’ subjects, all the better for brainwashing them and transforming them into the dreaded judges and juries who ruled as the ultimate enforcers. Domi and Edwards had tangled once when they were assigning the leadership of the Cerberus Away Team they shared. Edwards had been a difficult opponent, but Domi had put him in his place. Like most of the Magistrates, he was an alpha male, someone who felt that his brawn made him the most appropriate leader. But like all good wolves, Edwards had conceded when he was shown that he could be physically bested by the slender little albino wraith.

Since then, he and Domi were amicable allies and trusted teammates.

Edwards glanced over one thick, bulky shoulder, then shrugged his head back toward the two women who dug in the dirt around a small ring of stones with worn but barely readable inscriptions carved into them. Domi smirked. She knew that Brigid Baptiste was someone who could lose herself in scientific investigation easily, in the most unusual of climes. Though the sun beat down relentlessly on their uncovered heads, the environmental adaptations of the shadow suits kept their body temperatures low thanks to cooling systems woven into their high-tech fabric. Even sweating under a tied-off bandanna, Brigid was unwavering in her attention to the ancient scratches in the rock.

Brigid was a foot taller than Domi, and where the feral girl was cast in pale porcelain, the archivist was an explosion of color. Brigid was adorned with hair that looked like red silk interspersed with golden threads, sun-beaten skin that managed to tan despite her ginger tresses and emerald eyes that glimmered like precious gems. Right now she hid her orbs behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that allowed her to better inspect the stones around the small, nearly unnoticeable circle of rocks where the interphaser had deposited them.

The interphaser ferried the Cerberus explorers along a web of energy trails that connected at parallax points. So powerful were the currents rolling through these threads that when they intersected, humans felt the urge to build monuments to the power that coursed in the very ground. The Cerberus personnel had mapped many of the parallax points, both around the world and beyond, and built a device that exploited these naturally occurring focal points as a means of transferring people and goods.

Bored beyond the end of his usual impatience, Edwards resorted to sarcasm. “So, what are we looking for again? Humma Humma and the Cedar Chest and the city of Airy Do?”

“Humbaba and the Cedar Forest, and the city state of Eridu,” Brigid corrected. “Though I suspect that you, like Kane and Grant, have a better memory and comprehension than what you’re displaying.”

“Let me get this straight. We have an eight-foot stone monster running around, and you’re taking time out of dealing with this crisis to look for trees in the middle of a desert?” Edwards asked.

“Ullikummis is old,” Domi told Edwards. “Myth is old, and might have some truth. Maybe we can find weakness for Stoneface by looking in his old stomping grounds.”

“That freak was here?” Edwards asked.

Domi noted that the big ex-Mag was rubbing his forehead, brows furrowed in the unmistakable sign of a splitting headache. After Ullikummis’s first appearance, Edwards had been taking more aspirin of late, and his Commtact was no longer able to transmit; hence the bulky transmitter unit he wore on his hip.

Domi and the others could hardly blame the big man. Ullikummis had made Edwards one of his pawns by planting one of his seeds in his head. That kind of intrusion by a small pellet of intelligent stone must have been only slightly more comfortable than Domi’s own major headache after the mad god Maccan pumped unholy amounts of sonic energy straight into her skull. Domi had been on wobbly knees for a while after that, so she could empathize with her fellow CAT member. Such a violation would have been enough cause for a few weeks of rest and recreation, but Cerberus couldn’t spare the manpower.

At least Edwards retained his mobility and reflexes. Domi needed time to get back onto her feet after her brief coma.

“That freak,” Maria Falk spoke up. “Or one much like him, if Brigid’s reading is right.”

Falk was an older woman, her brown hair showing glimmers of silvering gray here and there. Domi loved the lunar scientist’s smile. She found more than a little kinship in the way that Falk always perked up but quietly chose to observe without drawing attention to herself. They shared a curiosity, but Domi felt for Falk. If the geologist was a house cat with just a little too much inquisitiveness, she wouldn’t be as adept at fighting her way out of trouble as the wildcat albino.

Falk was used to studying rocks, but she had complained before they made the interphaser jump. She wasn’t an archaeologist, but Brigid wanted a set of eyes that knew about terrain and natural earth formations. Tomb raiders were in short supply among the redoubt’s newly expanded staff.

Edwards tilted his head. “Okay, now I really am playing dumb. One like him?”

“Humbaba, or Humwawa, was appointed by Enlil himself as the guardian of the Cedar Forest. He was a giant with the face of a lion in some sources, and in others, his features resemble coiled entrails of men and beasts,” Brigid said.

“Maybe he’s a sloppy eater, or saving leftovers for later.” Edwards chuckled nervously.

Brigid raised an eyebrow at the thought. “That is a possibility.”

Edwards rested his face in his palm. “Great. A man-eating giant kitty cat.”

“He couldn’t be that big,” Domi said. “If he can wear the guts of his meal as a face mask.”

“Well, the legends said that Ullikummis was a giant who was so large his shoulders scraped the skies,” Brigid said. “The real one was nowhere that huge.”

“Small favors,” Edwards grumbled. “Humbaba’s alive, or dead?”

“Allegedly, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slew the beast,” Brigid answered.

“Who and what?” Edwards asked.

“King Gilgamesh, one of the original human heroes of mythology. His ally was a bull-man, sent by the gods to slay Gilgamesh—Enkidu,” Brigid said.

Edwards looked a little unfocused for a moment. “Why does that name sound familiar?”