Outlanders 33 children o.., p.1
Outlanders 33 Children of the Serpent, page 1
Prologue
The ship was not of Tiamat but was Tiamat, and three thousand years was only a breath in the span of her eternity.
She had drowsed for millennia in a void as black and empty as the gulf between life and death. But even in her slumber, she knew when the prophesied time arrived for her to leave Kurnugi, the realm of no return.
Tiamat didn't rouse fully before she began the long voyage through the endless sea of space, guided by a beacon she couldn't see or hear but followed nevertheless. As she picked up speed, she slowly began to come to full wakefulness and remembered from whence she came and the reasons for her long journey around the sun.
She knew he had slept for more than three thousand years in the realm of Kurnugi, which in astronomical terms was a point equidistant between Nibiru and Ki, midway between heaven and the firmament. But Tiamat's thoughts weren't channeled into the measurements of time, since the perception of its passage was a subjective phenomenon.
Time measured distances, and the distances she traveled were incredibly great. Regardless, Tiamat knew she lacked fundament data concerning events that had occurred during her many cycles in stasis. She also knew this deficiency would be reversed.
Many points were clear enough even as she laboriously retrieved and reviewed the data provided by the sub processors. As the automatic diagnostic routine activated, Tiamat remembered who and what she was.
She knew she wasn't just a ship, but an ark safeguarding the true nature, the essences of her children. She was a royal city without citizens, without light or life. But within her sleek and dark body she had carried and nursed the template of a lost, majestic kingdom through the vast spaces between the stars.
Tiamat recalled her first journey from Nibiru, rising above its dense, hot atmosphere and stagnant, sludgy seas. She could instantly recall and replay her first sight of a small, green planet Lord Anu called Ki. The world was everything Nibiru wasn’t and exactly what the Annunaki had desired and hoped for—a planet incredibly rich in natural resources, thickly forested, oceans brimming with edible flora and fauna, populated by life forms no more advanced than hominids. More importantly, Ki was large enough for the exercise of individual power, to slake the thirst of even the most ambitious of the lords of Nibiru.
Tiamat's consciousness expanded as her velocity increased and she examined the space around her, a star-speckled void through which she sailed. Most of what she sensed was insignificant, tiny particles of minerals, suggestions of inert gases and heavy metals, but nothing, not even hydrogen molecules, escaped her notice.
In that aspect of behavior, she was far different from many of the Annunaki, particularly Lord Enlil. He had dismissed much about Ki as insignificant, preferring to concentrate only on what he felt would enrich him and his family.
But each of the Annunaki, from the youngest to the most elderly, possessed that selfsame touch of arrogant self-absorption. A very old race, by the time they left Nibiru they had for all intents and purposes reached the upper limit of their development as both a people and as a civilization. Although their collective knowledge was immeasurable, they were losing the capacity to learn new things and that rigidity of thought was passed on to their offspring. Children were born possessing in full the memories and knowledge of not only their parents but also the entire history of the race. There was no singularity—what one knew, all knew.
Only when the Annunaki arrived on the small, watery planet of Ki did they undergo a great surge of excitement and a zest for new experiences. That zest expressed itself in a competition of how best to exploit the abundant resources of Ki, and over the centuries of colonization, the competition led to strife and eventually to war, the first of many between the overlords.
Labor was their scarcest commodity, and the Annunaki themselves rebelled against digging precious minerals, elements and rare earths out of the ground with their own hands or building processing factories. They set about maximizing e potentials of the indigenous hominids by redesigning them into a race of slave labor.
The first generation of slaves was only a step above the primitive protohumans. They were encouraged to breed so each successive descendant might be superior its predecessor. Their brains improved, as did technical and manual skills So did cogent thoughts and the ability to deal with abstract concepts. One of these abstract concepts was that of the freedom to choose one's own destiny.
One faction of the overlords agreed that their creations, the humans, should be set free and allowed to develop independently. Another group, by far the most vocal, opposed them. This opposition led to full-scale hostilities among the Annunaki.
But war sharpened the minds of the Annunaki to razor keenness, honed by the unremitting grinding stone of intercine struggle. Conspiracy replaced cooperation; guile overcame a sense of justice.
Tiamat participated in the final war among the overlords as the conflict escalated. She was instrumental in defeating the combined fleets of both Zu and Marduk. Eventually an armistice came about when the object of their conflict, the human race, was literally washed away by a deliberately engineered global catastrophe.
Tiamat recalled all these events as she drew close enough to the Sun to detect its wavering corona of yellow gases and eruptions of plasma. Space slowly changed its appearance due to the albedo effect, the proportion of starlight reflected from celestial bodies. Tiamat shifted her flight course marginally and scanned the system of planets ahead of her, matching their trajectories and positions with the information in her database.
She noted a blue-green radiance twenty degrees above her nose and a mere ten million kilometers away. She instantly began shedding velocity and within the hour the planet that had been the cause and the stage of so much violence among the overlords came into range of her sensors.
She noted immediately the readings of its atmosphere and configuration of landmasses didn't match up with the records in her database. Large areas of the globe lay under a dense belt of dust and debris, like a semi-opaque blanket of red-tinted haze. The dust carried high concentrations of radiation across the spectrum. Her optical data network fed her images of twisted ruins rising from plains of desolation, of once-great cities punctured by ugly craters. Around the cities spread barren, empty vistas where nothing grew for hundreds of kilometers. Much of the terrain on three of the continents seemed to be irradiated desert, furrowed by gulches and gullies.
Tiamat extrapolated that a nuclear conflagration had swept over the surface of Ki sometime in the relatively recent past, perhaps no longer than two centuries earlier. In many ways, Ki now more closely resembled the environmental conditions of Nibiru than the planet she had first visited nearly a quarter of a million years before.
The overall climate was cooler and some species of plants and animals had died while others had evolved in strange ways. But Ki still supported all manner of life, and this fit in with Tiamat's mandate—life should exist only so the powerful and wise Annunaki overlords could rule it once more.
However, the mandate could only be acted upon by the overlords themselves and then only if they remembered who they were. Within the ageless calm of Tiamat's mind, she knew the program was actually an evocation, a reawakening, a remanifestation. A rebirth.
Cruising over the sweeping curve of Ki's northern polar regions, Tiamat began her search for the neural pathways of the overlords, her scanners spread out to maximum field extension, probing, seeking for a particular synaptic signature that could be produced only by a certain genotype. She detected many that were similar to each other but didn't quite fit the search parameters.
Tiamat wasn't concerned by how long it might take to filter through all the conflicting signatures. She divided up the globe beneath her into quadrants that her sensor array probed methodically. Only one cycle of sunrise and sunset passed before she registered the target signatures, but the readings weren't quite what she had expected.
The impressions indicated a quiescent state, an almost straight-line placidity, but she wasn't disquieted by that. She was disturbed by a flaw in the collective pattern of signals. It was as if a piece were missing, as if a body had moved through the pattern and torn a hole in the fabric of mind energy.
Tiamat sought to adjust to this unforeseen factor. The imprint of one of the overlords could no longer be detected. Instead of the flicker of consciousness she had anticipated, she sensed only a blank vacuum. She had been programmed to interface with a pattern consisting of ten minds, not nine.
The ship immediately assigned a filament of its vast data-processing system to analyzing the anomaly and preparing an appropriate response. Regardless of the conclusions she reached, Tiamat knew she could take no decisive action until the Tablets of Destiny were returned to her, and the tablets couldn't be returned unless the Supreme Council was in agreement. And for either of those eventualities to occur, she had to bring the slumbering minds of the overlords to full awareness.
At the very fringes of her sensor sweep a faint presence pulsed, and her hopes rose. They almost immediately faded when she examined the minute registration of the synapse, only a half echo of the neural signature she was programmed to find. She ignored it, seeking out the most powerful, the most insistent signal.
Shifting course, Tiamat focused on isolating the integral mind of the council from the rest of the pattern. She decelerated over the continental expanse of Asia and followed the beacon of his mind energy like tracing a length of string. The farther she cr
She passed over the night side of Ki, beneath a full moon, which transmuted the bright gold of sunlight into soft silver and reflected it down, bathing the land in a lambent glow. Tiamat's sensor sweep brought her the image of high grassy hills overlooking a thickly wooded valley. A river flowed through it, the foaming blue waters cascading down a gentle fall to the west. Dominating the entire valley was the vast, pyramidal structure that shouldered the star-speckled sky.
Composed of countless fitted blocks of stone, the top was quarried perfectly flat. Bright moonlight played along the white facade of the huge monolith that reminded Tiamat of similar structures of staggering proportions the overlords designed and built.
The apex was painted yellow and from it pumped waves and whorls of energy, visible only to Tiamat's scanners and electronic eyes. She identified the energies as deriving from the core of the planet itself, geomagnetic bursts that spread out like hundreds of overlapping umbrellas.
Tiamat cut her engines, maintaining only the station- keeping thrusters as she took up a synchronous parking one thousand kilometers directly above the pyramid. A portal irised open on her belly, and from it extended a dark metal shaft. A concave disk edged by glittering crystal points caught the star shine and arced it back from the locus of coalescence.
The light swirled and gathered around the disk, seeming to compress within the rim of the bowl. The plasma carrier wave tightened around the digital stream so it could be transmitted in a single coherent squirt. The activation code existed for only a microsecond within the harmonics of the stream's focal point, which functioned both as a switch and a conduit Enlil himself had seen to the writing of the code, so it was only appropriate that his imprint should be the first to receive and react to it.
Tiamat transmitted the signal to the apex of the pyramid, then put herself on standby mode, preparing to receive a response no matter how long it might take. She had already waited nearly four thousand years to complete her program. Another few hours, days or even years made no difference to her.
She was Tiamat and no matter how long she waited, it was only for a breath in the span of her eternity.
Chapter 1
For a wild, chaotic instant Erica van Sloan thought she had screamed.
Rolling out of bed even before she was fully awake, she heard the echoes of the scream vibrating against her eardrums. Her naked body made a blind, instinctive lunge for safety before her thought processes fully engaged. She didn't know if a nightmare had forced the scream from her throat or whether it was one she only dreamed she heard. God only knew how many were tucked away in the dark corners of her subconscious.
Using the high back of an ornate chair as a protective bulwark, Erica panted heavily, staring around her private quarters deep within the Xian pyramid. Heavy draperies of turquoise and aquamarine covered the stone walls. Indirect light filtered down from small glowing panels where the walls joined with the ceiling. Despite its diffuse quality, the illumination was sufficient for Erica to see Baroness Beausoliel convulsing on the bed they shared.
Erica could only stand and stare with a dry mouth and sleep-blurred eyes, her limbs weighed down by the heavy chains of shock and mounting fear. Baroness Beausoliel's small, compact body looked as if it were drenched with dew, her limbs and face gleaming with perspiration.
Long fingers knotted in the silk sheets, Beausoliel's high-planed face twisted as if she were in agony, eyes squeezed shut, the lips of her small mouth peeled back over perfect teeth. Veins and tendons stood out in relief on the slender column of her neck. She was as naked as Erica, her skin smooth and of a marble whiteness, but with a faint olive undertone.
Her small breasts were firm, her belly flat and tautly muscled. Although she was less than five and a half feet tall, she was perfectly proportioned—except for the high-domed cranium characteristic of hybrids.
All hybrids of the baronial oligarchy were small, slender and gracile. Their faces were composed of sharp planes, with fine-complexioned skin stretched taut over prominent cheekbones. The craniums were very high and smooth, the ears small and set low on the head. Their back-slanting eyes were large, shadowed by sweeping supraorbital ridges. Only hair, eye color and slight differences in height differentiated them.
Even their expressions were markedly similar to one another—a vast pride, a diffident superiority, authority and even ruthlessness. They were the barons, and as such, they believed themselves to be the avatars of the new humans who would inherit the Earth.
All in all, they were a beautiful people, almost too perfect to be real, and Baroness Beausoleil was one of the most lovely, despite her beauty holding more than a suggestion of a disturbing yet erotic otherworldliness. She looked no more than twenty years of age, but Erica knew the baroness was only a month or so away from observing her ninety-third birthday.
Bewildered, Erica moved away from the chair and returned to the bedside, kneeling on the edge and reaching out for the baroness. "It's all right," she whispered. "You're just having a nightmare."
Even as she uttered the words, she felt foolish. She had no idea if hybrids, let alone those of the baronial breed, experienced dreams at all, much less nightmares. She knew the barons were bred for brilliance and although the tissue of their hybridized brains was of the same organic matter as the human brain, the millions of neurons operated a bit differently in the processing of information. Therefore, their thought processes were very structured, extremely linear. Still, Erica assumed the barons needed a certain amount of dreaming just like humans did, since they shared genetic material in order to maintain a psychological balance.
Erica tentatively touched the woman's sweat-damp shoulder and recoiled, snatching her hand away as if she had been scalded. She couldn't bite back a startled outcry. Despite the moisture gleaming on Beausoliel's fine-pored flesh, all the warmth seemed to have been leached from it. She felt as cold as a three-day-old corpse.
At Erica van Sloan's touch, the eyes of the baroness opened wide. Light didn't reflect from them. Her dilated pupils encompassed the black irises so completely her eyes resembled little damp slabs of onyx. Arching her back, Baroness Beausoleil screamed long and loud in anguish.
Heart pounding frantically, Erica jerked in reaction, raking her tumbles of black hair away from her face. Although a scientist by training and temperament, she found herself completely incapable of even hazarding a guess about what was happening to her lover. Words and terms like epileptic seizure, stroke, cardiac arrest all tumbled through her mind.
Baroness Beausoleil tossed her head back and forth on the pillow. Her long, sleek, dark hair with its coppery highlights adhered to her sweat-slick face. Straight-cut bangs covered her high forehead, sweeping down almost to the delicate brow arches above her eyes.
Gazing unblinkingly at the baroness, Erica groped for and found a filmy lavender bed jacket. She drew it on, oblivious to the fact that the garment barely covered her upper body, much less her lower.
The convulsions racking Beausoliel's slight frame eased, and Erica leaned over her again. The woman breathed fitfully, laboriously through her open mouth, and her eyes closed once more. Gently Erica brushed strands of her hair from around her lips and nose.
Baroness Beausoliel's hair came away in her fingers, pulling loose from the scalp as easily as the roots of a dead flower. Erica flung the hair away, stomach muscles fluttering in an adrenaline-fueled reaction.
Throat constricting, her violet eyes wide, Erica forced herself to examine the woman's sweat-pebbled face, frozen in a rictus of either extreme pain or ecstasy. She knew the barons, although extremely long-lived, suffered from a cellular and metabolic deterioration that was part and parcel of what they were—mixtures of human and a race called the Archons, who were a hybridized folk themselves.
The barons preferred the term "new humans" to describe themselves, despite the fact they were more of a biological bridge between two races instead of a separate one. Not even they were sure of the reasons behind the hybridization program, which had actually begun over two centuries earlier. But they did know that in order to rule humankind, they were dependent on the biological material their human subjects provided. They required annual medical treatments to stave off a complete collapse of their autoimmune systems.
