“No, sir. Someone named Cassius.”
It was not something the Marine Corps spoke of publicly or discussed with recruits. NCOs and officers were aware of the technology, of course, but rarely thought about it. Why should they? Mark VII suits required sophisticated arrays of microprocessors to sense and follow the wearer’s movements. Though built of ultralight alloys, carbon fiber, and plastic laminates, a Mark VII suit was heavy and required considerable power to enable the wearer simply to move, even to stand without becoming exhausted. It was a simple thing for Cassius to take every microprocessor in King’s Mark VII offline, turning it into an inert mass of very heavy metal and plastic.
And General King collapsed on the steps like a sack of meal, just like a simulated casualty back in boot camp.
Gavin Norris
Chamber of the Eye
Pyramid of the Eye
New Sumer, Ishtar
1951 hours ALT
Norris crouched next to the Frog, sweat beading on his forehead. “Yes, you understood me,” he said. “We’ll give you technology for your Sag-ura slaves, as many as you want to send us.”
“What…would we want with…Blackhead technology?” the Frog said, its English broken and hesitant, but understandable. “We are the Godmind. We are your gods.”
A clatter of falling armor made Norris look up. “Shit. What’s going on out there?”
“I’ll check,” Carleton replied, hurrying toward the door.
There was no time for this ponderous back and forth. Norris had watched Friar Tuck make his connection, allowing the purple goo to flow over his neck and head. It was unappetizing, sure, but no worse than a lot of things he had done. Suddenly, impetuously, he shoved his left hand into a mass of the translucent jelly and pulled a glob of it to the side of his face.
The Abzu-il was not intelligent, of itself. It was, in fact, a gene-tailored organism created by the Ahannu many thousands of years before, a living creature without a mind of its own, which could connect the minds of the gods.
The Sentient Sea itself, however, a kind of internal dreamscape of melded minds and stored memories, had its own intelligence, its own awareness.
And it was utterly unlike anything Gavin Norris had ever seen or felt before.
He felt…tendrils of writhing ice penetrating his ears, his nose, the pores of his skin. There was a piercing stab of agony across the left side of his head as the thing worked its way through bone with lightning speed and settled into the contours of Norris’s brain.
Norris’s human brain. Humans and Ahannu were much alike in many ways, but they were not the same species or even remotely related. Aspects of their biologies, which they shared, by chance or design, included such basics as a shared left-handedness in amino acids and a shared right-handedness in sugars. They could eat many of the same foods…a fact that the ancient Ahannu had taken advantage of when they’d enslaved early humans to raise crops for them in the fertile river valleys of distant Kia long ago.
But the thought processes were mutually alien, so much so that very little of the Abzu was at all intelligible to Norris.
He saw—felt, rather—fragments of Memories…a whirling chaos of thoughts and alien language and symbologies so distant from his ken he could perceive it only as a kind of storm of color; of nightmare shape; of violent and throbbing scent and taste; of shrieking atonal chords of sound; of a prickling rain of fire across his skin; intense sexual lust; of sadness, fear, joy, despair, greed…
He heard the colors, shrill blues and reds and purples.
He smelled the music, alien and deafening, a cacophony of odor.
He heard the touch of living flame as his skin charred.
He screamed….
Lance Corporal Garroway
Pyramid of the Eye
New Sumer, Ishtar
1951 hours ALT
Warhurst and another Marine tackled the civilian outside, dragging him down, as Garroway spun around the corner of the entranceway and jumped into the cool darkness of the Chamber of the Eye. He wasn’t sure at first what he was seeing…one of the civilians lying on her back by the wall, blood on the front of her coverall; a Frog seated cross-legged at the back, his head encased in purple goo; another civilian kneeling next to the Frog, head back, eyes wildly staring, shrieking at the top of his lungs as purple gunk rippled over his face.
That civilian held a small handgun. Garroway nearly threw himself across the chamber, swiping at the gun with one gauntleted paw and sending the weapon clattering in pieces across the floor.
The civilian—Norris—kept screaming, oblivious to the Marines now crowding into the chamber. “What do we do, sir?” Garroway asked Warhurst. “It’s killing him!”
“No.” The single word came from the seated Ahannu. It raised a hand, and the purple mess began draining from Norris’s ears and face. Flowing from his skin. “No. We are…sorry. We did not mean…this one harm.”