Outlanders 39 Hydra's Ring, page 25
A fierce rivalry arose between opposing factions of the Annunaki for the hearts and minds of people, partly because they had come to depend increasingly on human kings and their armies to achieve their ends. When this situation became too unwieldy, the Annunaki chose to create a new dynasty of rulers, known as demigods or god-kings, because of their exalted bloodlines.
As a bridge between themselves, a pantheon of gods and humankind, they introduced the concept of the god- king on Earth. They appointed human rulers who would assure humankind's service to the deities and channel their teachings and laws to the people.
Sumerian texts described how although the Annunaki retained lordship over the lands and humankind was viewed as little more than a tenant farmer, humanity grew arrogant. Fearing a unified human race, both in culture and purpose, the Annunaki adopted the imperial policy of divide and rule. For while humankind reached higher cultural levels and the populations expanded, the Annunaki themselves fell into decline.
The Annunaki ruler returned to Nibiru after arranging a division of powers and territories on Earth between his feuding sons, Enlil and Enki. Civilizations such as Egypt, Sumer and the Rama Empire were created by the two half brothers. Wars were fought by the extended families of Enki and Enlil, and the nations changed hands back and forth through different conflicts.
"Enki was grooming you to be his pocket god-king," Brigid said, "but he wanted you to be a civilizing influence, not a conquering one."
Wei Qiang smiled. "That tactic took too long. Five thousand years ago, the people of China were barbarians and peasants, immune to reason. They equated kindness with weakness. A swifter, more decisive plan had to be put into place to save time."
"What did you care about time?" Grant demanded. "Weren't you practically immortal?"
The smile fled from Qiang's face. "Only to a point. The maximum life span the Kai Bu Xiu can bestow is perhaps thirty thousand years, give or take, but it's youthfulness that matters, vitality ...which I have not enjoyed in many centuries."
"And that is what the reborn Enlil has offered you," Erica said. She did not ask a question; she made a statement.
Wei Qiang inclined his head toward Musgrave. "So his agent has said, if I fulfill a few tasks."
Anger sent a sudden flush of heat to the back of Kane's neck and caused the blood to pound in his temples. "The consortium is working for the overlords?"
Musgrave sneered. "We're strictly acting as intermediaries in this situation, Kane. Or intermediaries of intermediaries, to be precise."
"Which I'm sure all millennialists always endeavor to be," Brigid put in sardonically.
Musgrave affected not to have heard the remark. "We're aware of the fall of the baronies, but not the specifics. A representative of the entity that calls himself overlord Baal sought us out and proposed we arrange the displacement of Erica van Sloan from the Xian pyramid."
"Why didn't he do it himself?" Erica asked "Is he afraid to face me?"
Musgrave made a scoffing noise. "Hardly. Enlil is too concerned with other matters to waste his attention and resources on such a trifling irritant as you. However, he did suggest we seek out Wei Qiang because at one time, the pyramid had been his home."
Qiang shrugged negligently. "More like a summer home and storage unit."
"The consortium supplied Wei Qiang with everything he needed:" Musgrave continued. "It put quite a strain on our resources, but we feel the investment is worth the dividends."
Grant eyed Wei Qiang critically. "And in exchange for the rings and your youth, Enlil expects you to act as his puppet, like you did for Enki thousands of years ago. He wants you to lay claim to China and fight off any incursions from the other overlords:'
"He has not expressed such a desire to me," Wei Qiang said, returning his gaze to the suit of jade armor. "But I imagine the arrangement he has in mind is something like that."
"So the mighty Huang-ti, the Yellow Emperor, is happy to serve as a slave of an inhuman monster?" Lakesh snapped. "You thought you would be ruler of a world empire once, and Enki ended that dream. Why do you think it would be in his half brother's interest to return you to your youth and revive all of that overweening ambition?"
Musgrave shifted position and snapped, "Be quiet."
"Why should we?" Erica asked, drawing herself up haughtily. "Could it be that the Millennial Consortium doesn't want Wei Qiang to know that the overlords are the resurrection of a monstrous evil and that Enlil's plan for him is to act as his chief human foreman of a slave and cannon fodder farm? He'll act as the straw boss, but he'll still be a slave. The only difference is that Wei Qiang will be an immortal slave."
Picking up on Erica's thread, Lakesh said calmly, "And of course, Mr. Musgrave here secretly conspired with Enlil to enslave you... didn't you, Mr. Musgrave?"
For a long moment, Wei Qiang stood motionless, face showing no emotion. Then he made a low, growling noise deep in his throat and he turned toward Werner Musgrave. The man cringed from the unreasoning fury that blazed from Qiang's eyes, the mad rage of a monarch who suddenly realized he had been duped into handing over his kingdom to an enemy.
Chapter 29
Wei Qiang slowly advanced on Werner Musgrave. In a low-pitched tone, made even more frightening by its lack of inflection, he said, "I'll be slave to neither god, demon or man. Not even for immortality."
Musgrave backed toward the door, swinging his Calico in short arcs to cover the outlanders and the soldiers. The yellow-uniformed men followed his Movements with grim eyes and steady gun barrels. He said petulantly, "It was your vanity that caused Enki to turn against you all those centuries ago, Wei Qiang. Don't make the same stupid mistake again with Enlil."
Wei Qiang extended a hand. "Give me the rings."
Musgrave acted as if he hadn't heard, still stepping back toward the doorway. "Tell your men to drop their guns, and then we can talk about this like reasonable, pragmatic men."
Wei Qiang did not lower his hand. "The rings. Do not leave this room with them, Musgrave...if you wish to live."
"You're useful to Enlil, to the consortium," Musgrave said, a wheedling note entering his voice. "We can forge a great alliance...our combined power will bring us all the wealth and power we ever dreamed of."
"As a slave?" Brigid interjected. "The slave of Enki turned against the Annunaki once before. Why would Enlil trust him again? Once Wei Qiang has served his purposes, establishing a beachhead here in China, he'll be discarded. All Enlil really wanted was for Erica, the Dragon Mother, to be displaced from Xian. That's been accomplished."
"Yes," Erica chimed in, her tone brittle with undisguised mockery. "Enlil gave you the job as his eviction agent. Rather a steep career decline for the Yellow Emperor, don't you think?"
Picking up on the thread of playing to Wei Qiang's wounded vanity, Lakesh put in, "You served as a figurehead for brigands to rally around, but you know damned well Enlil won't allow you to take up residence in the pyramid again. He wants it and the Heart of the World only for himself."
Wei Qiang's face lost its masklike placidity and twisted into a rictus of homicidal fury. He dropped his arm to his side and hissed between clenched teeth, "I have changed my mind. You may depart, Musgrave."
The man's tense, scarred face relaxed with relief, then almost instantly locked tight with suspicion. "I can take the rings?"
"If you must." Wei Qiang inclined his head a fraction of an inch. "Take them and go."
The man made a move to step over the threshold, then paused. "You're coming with me, to make sure your men don't try to kill me."
"They will not," Wei Qiang stated. "Leave, before I change my mind and order them to shoot you down where you stand."
Musgrave glanced feverishly around at the furnishings of the room, licked his lips, then with a sigh of resignation backed away into the corridor. He called, "When you've had the time to think this all over, I'm sure you'll come to the most logical decision. Self- respect and service in exchange for immortality is the kind of deal I wish was offered to me. I know I'd accept it without a second thought."
Wei Qiang's lipless mouth creased in a smile and he whispered as to himself, "Of that I am sure, consortium man."
The clank of metal on metal, the rhythmic clicking of joints suddenly came to their ears as well as a howl of terror from Musgrave. Looking down the corridor, they saw a blurred pair of towering figures striding swiftly after the millennialist. A chill crept up Kane's spine as he watched the metal colossi lumbering out of the wall niches.
"Robots," Grant murmured. "Those statues are guardian robots."
"The automata are programmed to prevent anything from leaving this vault," Wei Qiang said. "I'm gratified to see that my mechanical men still work after all this time. It was one of the few gifts from Enki that I actually enjoyed."
Brigid gazed in awed wonder at the machine-men pursuing Werner Musgrave. The man sprinted in raw panic, uttering wild cries with every step.
When he reached the rotunda, he stumbled to an unsteady halt as more of the robot warriors marched out of the corridor mouths, tramping toward the place where Musgrave stood. Bleating in wordless horror as realization came to him, Musgrave dropped the box containing the rings and sprayed the automatons with full-auto fire from the Calico. The bullets bounced off the armored torsos and heads with keening whines, little sparks flaring at the points of impact. The robots' relentless pace did not falter. They closed in around him, swords lifting and falling. Wei Qiang whirled, shouting in anger, and the other soldier wheeled, raising his Calico. Grant depressed the trigger stud of his Sin Eater and the 9 mm round smacked into the lower belly of the trooper. The man staggered backward a score of feet, bent double around an agonizing wound. By the time he collapsed, nearly at the base of the bamboo throne, he was unconscious due to the double trauma of pain and hydrostatic shock.
The sound of metal shearing through flesh and bone was loud and ugly, but Musgrave stopped screaming almost instantly. Brigid winced, feeling her stomach roil. Absently she noted that all of the metal warriors bore small round holes in the centers of their backs, each one surrounded by a little raised collar of engraved metal. Wei Qiang did not expend any time ministering to his injured trooper. A long sideways leap brought him beside Erica. His left hand tangled in her hair as he wrestled her in front of him. They grappled violently for a long moment, and Lakesh 'quickly tried to get behind Qiang. The four knob-tipped keys Erica had removed from the door fell from beneath her cloak and rolled across the floor.
Wei Qiang chuckled, a raspy sound as heartwarming as old bones rattling around in a tin can. His gaze, as well as that of his troopers, was fixed on the scene in the rotunda. Kane caught Grant's eye and the two men exchanged a short, almost imperceptible nod. Kane moved with the desperate swiftness of a man who has long lived by the speed of hand and eye. Hissing in anger, Wei Qiang snapped away the golden cone from his thumb and pressed the razor-keen edge of his nail against Erica's throat, indenting the flesh over the jugular vein. "Stop," he commanded, "or she dies?'
He swung his right arm in a flat backward sweep, his Sin Eater weighted forearm slamming into a soldier's neck. There was faint, mushy crunch of cartilage. Like a man who has slipped on a patch of ice, the trooper's legs flew out from under him and he crashed heavily onto his back. Kane aimed his Sin Eater at his head. "And you don't think you will, too?"
"I honestly don't know," Wei Qiang replied with surprising frankness. "I suppose we'll find out together."
"There's a better way to resolve this, isn't there?" Lakesh asked. "You don't want to serve Enlil's cause, and we don't want you to serve Enlil's cause. There's a great deal of common ground right there."
"I serve no master but myself," Wei Qiang spit autocratically. "Ever and always. No creature will ever trick me into acting as its pawn and live to reap the spoils of its duplicity."
"All right, then." Lakesh spread his hands wide in a conciliatory gesture. "Why do we have be at each other's throats?"
"Because," Erica said between clenched teeth, "his goals are the same as Enlil's he wants to set himself up as a god, as he did in the old days."
Wei Qiang's drum-tight features stretched in a death's-head grin of appreciation. "Very astute, Tui Chui Jian. But this time I'd insure that mortals like you stayed few in numbers and poor in resources. Just like Enlil and the overlords, I wouldn't make the same mistake of letting your kind multiply to where you become threats again?'
"What makes you think we're going to allow you inside that jade armor and wear the Hydra rings and renew yourself so you can put your plan into motion?" Grant growled.
The sound of heavy footfalls and metallic clankings and clickings echoed from just outside the door. Two of the robots lumbered into the chamber. One of them carried the wooden box with blood-wet brass fingers. Red photoreceptors glowed like coals dug out from the furnace of hell.
"It's not up to you to allow anything, Grant," Qiang said, his voice dropping to a throaty purr. "My servants here will make sure it happens as I wish it to happen. Dr. Singh, take the box and then set it down on the lap of the Kai Bu Xiu. Do it now, unless you would prefer to watch me carve an epic Wu poem on this whore's breasts."
Swallowing hard, Lakesh crossed the room to the robot and, after a moment's hesitation, removed the box from its grasp. He returned to the Armor of Immortality and placed the box exactly where Wei Qiang instructed him. "Now what?"
"Stay there." He backed up to the bamboo throne, still holding Erica in front of him. "The rest of you...go outside."
Grant, Brigid and Kane did not move.
Wei Qiang slowly drew the scimitar curve of his thumbnail across Erica's slender throat, leaving a thread of blood in its wake. "Do it. I have no compunctions about killing this pyramid squatting, Annunaki loving slut."
"Please do as he says," Lakesh said quietly. If not for her, then for me."
The three people hesitated a moment longer, then turned and started for the doorway. Wei Qiang returned to the bamboo throne, shifting his grip on Erica from around her throat and waist to her arms. "Dr. Singh, take the rings out of the box and place them on the fingers of the armor," he said.
Brigid cast a glance over her shoulder at Qiang. When she saw his attention was fixed on the wooden box, she lunged forward, tucking and rolling. She came to her feet directly behind one of the automatons, an ebony rod in her hand. She jammed a knobbed end into the socket inset in the robot's back and felt a surge of satisfaction when it caught fast. She gave it a twist and the metal warrior swiveled at the waist, arms swinging wide. The edge of one brass hand swept across her shoulder, bowling her off her feet.
The upper body of the metal warrior continued to spin, its right fist bashing against the head of its companion with a deafening crash of jangling metal. Shock rooted Wei Qiang in place, and Erica fought out of his grasp, leaving her cloak clutched in his hands. She rushed toward the concealed portal.
Rubbing her throbbing shoulder and scooting backward to get away from the robots, Brigid shouted to Kane, "The other keys! Grab one and cram it in!"
Without hesitation or question, Kane did as she said, bounding forward, scooping up a rod from the floor and slamming the knob into the socket on the second robot's back. He twisted and then ducked, barely avoiding a scythe-like sweep of its hand.
The two automatons turned on each other, metal- shod limbs rising and falling, smashing against each other. The alloyed gladiators locked in combat. They staggered and stumbled, crashing against the walls, knocking loose plate-sized chunks of masonry.
Grant, Kane and Brigid scrambled out of their path, moving to a far corner. The din of the battle was almost stunning, as brass hands wrenched and tore at steel limbs and sword-equipped extremities slashed rents in metal skulls and plunged through mailed thoraxes.
Sparks showered from torn relay boxes, and power packs burst with ear-compressing concussions. Thick, harsh smoke seethed from the giant bodies. Hissing skeins of electricity clung to their bodies and the giant figures stopped. They heard the muffled thump of explosions and wreaths of black oily smoke squirted from the joints in the robot's exoskeletons. The red glare of their photoreceptors died.
The two metal warriors froze, limbs locked together. For a long moment, no one in the chamber did anything but stand and stare.
Then Grant's fingers groped over the grenades clipped to his combat harness. He gripped a metal-shelled canister, detaching it from the harness, thumb flipping the priming pin away and depressing the red arming button atop it.
He shouted, "Lakesh!" and lobbed it in a looping overhead throw then flung his body flat on the floor. Lakesh, his face registering startlement, caught the grenade on its downward arc, squawked once in dismay and tossed it toward Wei Qiang, who stood behind the black throne.
He yelled, "Huang-ti!" and hurled himself in the opposite direction.
Surprise stamped itself on Wei Qiang's face, due either to being addressed by his true name or the sight of the object flying toward him. Reflexively, his hands opened and he caught it. Realization and recognition gleamed in his eyes an instant before a blaze of light suddenly illuminated the area around the black throne and the Armor of Immortality with a white, incandescent glare. A tremendous cracking roar, half explosion, half windstorm, slammed against Lakesh's eardrums The shock wave of the concussion was slight, but he felt invisible hands tugging at him, trying to yank him backward.
A gout of oxygen, smoke, scraps of silk and even an ivory screen swirled around him, irresistibly sucked back toward the wedge of instant vacuum created by the detonation of the DM-54 implode grenade.
He lunged behind a statue of the goddess Xiwangmu, who ruled eternal paradise, and for an eerie split second, his body hung motionless in midair, his momentum interrupted. Then the maelstrom effect created by the implosive device collapsed in on itself and he fell heavily, grunting in pain. At the same time he felt and heard tiny fragments of jade pattering down all around him
