Free God War by James Axler Page B

letting the quantum window wash over her like the tide on a beach, bathing her in its power.
    An instant later, Sela Stone found herself stepping out of the rift onto an expanse of sand close to a riverbank. Hundreds of people were massing there—perhaps thousands—each one loyal to her master, Ullikummis, a vast sea of people clamoring for space.
    Up ahead, Sela could see the silhouette of a dragon, its craning neck lunging into the skies as if to smell the low clouds that danced before the morning sun. The dragon was five or six miles away, at least, yet it was so immense that its head towered over the vista of the Euphrates River, and its wings spread out, reaching to perhaps a mile away from where she stood. The wings were ragged and skeletal, their bones pale-colored struts like some weird panorama of buildings.
    Behind Sela, the dozen farmers had followed, stepping from the rift in space to add their bodies to the burgeoning army of Ullikummis. They followed not because of the obedience stone—unlike Sela, they hadn’t received an implant—but because they wanted to believe that there could be this golden future, the one that Ullikummis, their stone-clad fallen angel, had promised.
    Sela, like a number of others among the thousands-strong crowd, felt the call because of the stone that had been implanted in her head. Known as an obedience stone, it was a tiny chip from Ullikummis’s own body. He could grow these at will, tearing them from his body like buds from a plant. All of them had a droplet of rudimentary sentience, enough that they could speak to their hosts, bonding with them and influencing their thoughts. Accepting the obedience stone was traumatic, for the stone had to push through the skin to bond itself to the user, but this pain had come to be seen as a rite of passage among the faithful, a sacrifice they made in their devotion to the new god. After all, the faithful preached, the stone created a new way of understanding the world, a new life, and as such, it was a birth and any birth was characterized as much by pain as by joy, was it not?
    The stone pulsed within Sela, hugging the lobes of her brain, its tendrils enveloping her mind. The stone brought an enlightenment, a freedom for the bearer. It was an entheogen, bringing to all people who used it a sense of being a part of their god. The stones acted as markers, too, the same way that the transponders were used by the Cerberus people, and it was through these locators that Ullikummis had reached out for his most faithful, opening the multiwindow of the quantum interphase jump in a way that had never been seen before. A hundred quantum gateways had all opened upon the same location—on this location. This, too, was something that Ullikummis had learned in the Ontic Library, accessing its sentient banks of knowledge to discover new ways to utilize the Annunaki technology. These were old secrets, things that had been forgotten millennia ago. Ullikummis could generate parallax points where there were none, and he could fold quantum space in such a way that he could jump between parallax points, ambushing even the most wary of opponents. The old ways were the new ways.
    * * *
    “D AMMIT !”R OSALIA CURSED as she and Grant prowled warily along the edge of the city, as close as they dared get to the massing army on the banks of the Euphrates.
    Grant glared at her. “You want to keep it down?” he warned.
    When he looked he saw that Rosalia was holding her left wrist and her teeth were clenched in pain.
    “What is it?” Grant asked more gently, regretting his knee-jerk reaction.
    “Stone’s playing up,” the dark-haired woman answered, breathing hard through her nostrils.
    “Run that by me again?” Grant requested, clearly confused.
    “I have the stone inside me,” Rosalia said, “you know that. Damn thing’s pounding against my nerve like a fucking metronome.” She winced, holding down hard on her wrist until the pain passed.
    Like Sela