his own people, imprisoned in the meteor and flung into space, only to return five thousand years later and rain havoc on the world in his fury at what had been done to him. When he reappeared, Ullikummis had sown the seeds of a new religion, one dedicated to his worship and that granted its users incredible—almost supernatural—control of their physical bodies. But he had been opposed by the brave warriors of Cerberus, who had seen the worst that the Annunaki race was capable of, and realized the wicked intentions at the heart of the stone god’s plans. In retaliation, Ullikummis had almost destroyed the Cerberus organization, infiltrating their headquarters and brainwashing several of their number, including Brigid Baptiste. However, the monster had finally been destroyed by Kane, thrown into the sun using a teleportational rig.
Although Ullikummis had been defeated, his worshippers continued to blindly follow his teachings, creating a new and growing cult in his name. Kane and Brigid had initially been dispatched to check the site of the fallen meteor prison, but on discovering it was now an impenetrable and highly guarded temple dedicated to Ullikummis the stone god, they had gone undercover, infiltrating the congregation at a mass in his name before joining this pilgrimage to the site itself.
“Roundabout way to see a hunk of space rock,” Kane grumbled to Brigid as they joined the others on the walk to the temple’s entry itself.
“It’s not as if we had anything better to do,” Brigid replied, wiping aside a sodden curl of flame-red hair.
Kane had no answer to that. He just tried to resist the urge to check that he was still armed.
More adherents waited at the doors, dressed in the familiar robes of coarse fabric, red shield on the breast, hoods up against the chill and rain. Beyond them, a tall archway led into the tower itself, open but set deep into the structure so that the punishing rain would not go straight inside. There were other pilgrims, too, another smaller group just entering the grand archway, their own transport parked up to the side of the gravel pen. Several of the group stopped before the archway and knelt, bowing so that they touched their foreheads to the ground in a gesture of absolute supplication.
Kane and Brigid were ushered along with the rest of their party, making their way toward the arch. “Think we ought to bow?” Kane asked, whispering the question from the side of his mouth.
Brigid didn’t reply, but instead dropped to her knees in the wet gravel and began pleading to the stone god to help her and the world he so loved. Kane was impressed—if he didn’t know better, he’d be convinced she was buying into this stone cult nonsense, hook, line and sinker.
They passed through the archway and entered a lobby-like area, which opened out into the main chamber of the tower. The lobby was eight paces end to end, but ran entirely around the base of the tower in a complete circuit. It was divided from the main chamber by thick stone pillars, rough-surfaced and tightly packed so that only a sliver of the main room could be seen through them. The pillars were so closely spaced that only one or two people could pass between them into the main chamber at any one time, which meant that the lobby momentarily became a bottleneck as the group of thirty-one passed through.
Within, the tower felt warm after the icy rain, and Kane took a moment just to breathe in the air. It had a scent to it, a trace of burning, like toast left too long under the grill.
It was darker inside, too, even after the dullness of the overcast day. The tower had no formal windows, only ragged lines cut into the external walls. Each of these lines had been filled with red-orange glass, giving a kind of fiery half-light to the interior. It felt a little like stepping into a volcano. Kane jolted, recognizing the quality of that light: when Ullikummis had penetrated Cerberus’s defences and taken control of their headquarters, he had reshaped it into something he had dubbed Life Camp Zero, a cross between a prison and a reeducation center. The walls of the Cerberus redoubt had been masked by living rock, the light fixtures replaced with bubbles of volcanic fire, casting everything in a hot orange glow. This place—this temple—had that same glow. It disoriented Kane for a moment—he had been a prisoner in Life Camp Zero, had suffered terribly at the hands of his jailers before ultimately turning the tables and killing them. He didn’t think much about that period of his life—when he had absorbed an obedience stone into his body and momentarily sacrificed his independence to Ullikummis so that he could escape.
Brigid, too, had sacrificed her independence to Ullikummis, though for her it was involuntary. Ullikummis had held her in a cell in a sea fortress called Bensalem, where he had twisted her thought processes, brainwashing her into seeing things in a new and inhuman way—the way of the Annunaki. Brigid’s senses had been overwhelmed with the psychic onslaught and she had finally given up, hiding her real personality in a higher plane of consciousness and letting her body be possessed by her wicked Annunaki self—an abomination called Brigid Haight. The evil she had committed as Haight still haunted her, even though she had had no control of her actions.
“Kane, you’ve stopped,” Brigid said quietly, pushing her hand gently against her partner’s back.
Kane shook his head. “Sorry, I was miles away,” he admitted. “The light kind of...brings it all back.”
Brigid nodded once in understanding. “The stone lord is still with us,” she said, raising her voice so that the people around her could hear. No matter how disconcerting this experience was, she and Kane had to remember that they were here undercover; that for all intents and purposes, they were just two more pilgrims hoping to find salvation in the wisdom of the stone god.
A moment later, the Cerberus warriors had moved past the pillars and into the depths of the temple. The fiery glow was brighter here, the light shimmering a little as if it were alive—an illusion from the passing clouds and the rain on the slivers of red glass.
The interior chamber was circular and of moderate but impressive size, like a midsize conference room or a small theater, able to hold perhaps eighty people before it felt crowded. Just now, Kane estimated, there were fifty pilgrims here, plus a half-dozen acolytes, easily identifiable by their robes and red insignias. However, the room’s proportions seemed more impressive because it stretched all the way up through to the height of the tower, rising thirty-five feet into the air in a grand column, where the giant red eye glared outward and in, casting a red oval disc across a spot on the floor. That red spot highlighted a huge brown rock standing in the very center of the chamber. The rock was almost circular but it had split down the middle to reveal a hollow interior, the two sides pulled apart by incredible force. The rock was as large as a Sherman tank, and where Kane could see the interior he saw that the walls were thick, despite its hollow center. This had been the prison cell of Ullikummis, launched into space millennia ago, returning to Earth less than two years ago and bringing its sole prisoner back home. The rock was surrounded by a circle of hard-packed earth, beyond which the floor had been paved with large slabs of slate.
Across to one side stood a caldron pit, blistering with flames, their heat emanating throughout the room.
There was one other item in this central chamber besides the caldron and the rock, and it transfixed Brigid Baptiste from the moment she walked through the gap in the pillars. It was an exquisitely carved alabaster statue of a woman, a third again life-size, standing with arms outstretched as though to welcome someone into a hug. The woman was slim and tall, with long legs and a cloak over her shoulders that draped down past her knees. She wore a skintight catsuit that, in reality, would have hugged every curve of her svelte, athletic form. The catsuit had been painted in a glossy black, like a beetle’s wing. The face had been left unpainted, the white alabaster shining pink in the glow from the fire windows, but the lion’s mane of hair had been daubed with color—a rich red-gold like a halo of living flames.
Brigid gasped as she saw the statue. “Kane, look!” she said.
Kane turned, eyeing the statue in admiration.
“It’s Haight,” Brigid whispered. “It’s...me.”
Designated Task #004: Manufacturing
Like all villes, manufacturing is performed here at Epsilon Level. I have been assigned to a work crew of twenty people who perform the repetitive tasks of sorting, assembling and checking the parts