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teammates Kane, Grant and Domi, Brigid and her field team had been freed and the training camp destroyed. Ullikummis, however, had somehow evaded death, his whereabouts undetected by the Cerberus rebels.
    The hideous stone god had briefly reappeared while Brigid, Kane and Grant investigated an undersea library along with oceanographer Clem Bryant, but they had seen nothing of Ullikummis since then.
    Brigid’s mind raced back, trying to recall how she had ended up here, in this cave, trapped before the brooding form of the stone god. Her mind began to fill in the blanks, but before she could sort it out, Ullikummis reached for her with one of his mighty stone hands and tenderly brushed his rock fingers down her left cheek. They were cold to the touch and rough, like the stone they resembled.
    â€œYou were hurt,” Ullikummis said, his uncanny eyes glowing more brightly for just a moment. “Does it hurt still?”
    Brigid pondered the question, wondering if this wassome kind of trick. Finally, she spoke. “Yes,” she admitted. “It hurts a little.”
    â€œIt is nothing,” Ullikummis assured her. “The human form can endure less than the Annunaki, but this wound is but a trifling thing. Do you wish to see it?”
    Brigid’s eyes met her captor’s, if that was truly what he was, and she nodded very slowly as his fingers remained pressed against her skin. “Please,” she said.
    Ullikummis pulled his hand back, and began to stride away across the space behind her. She waited, bound to the chair, and her heart raced in fear as she heard the creature of living rock pacing across the stone floor, his steps echoing like hammer blows.
    As Ullikummis’s mighty footsteps faded into the distance, Brigid took a moment to gather her thoughts. She had a remarkable gift of eidetic recollection, more popularly known as a photographic memory. Brigid was able to remember the smallest details of anything she had witnessed. The last she could recall, she had been with the other members of CAT Alpha—Kane and Grant—as their atoms were digitized and sent across the quantum ether via the mat-trans unit, a teleportation device in use by the Cerberus operation. The three of them had emerged in their home base of the Cerberus redoubt to a scene of carnage. The overhead lighting had been sparking, and the nearest of the computers was shattered, blood smeared across the shards of its monitor screen. There had been shouting, too, and gunfire, and Brigid and her companions had been forced to assess the situation in less than two seconds, realizing their help was needed urgently.
    Eight hooded strangers were in the operations room, where the mat-trans unit was located, and they were in the process of destroying the equipment there whileCerberus personnel tried to fend them off. As Brigid scanned the area, Domi’s pure white albino form had dropped from an overhead vent and leaped across the room, bouncing from work surface to work surface like streaking lightning as a stream of bullets—were they bullets?—whipped through the air at her. Beside Brigid, Kane was already drawing his Sin Eater pistol, the 18-inch muzzle of the weapon unfolding in his hand as it was propelled from its hiding place beneath the sleeve of his jacket.
    Agile and girlish, Domi blasted a stream of shots from her Detonics Combat Master, firing behind her as she leaped behind one of the computer terminals. In a second, the glass screen of the terminal shattered as one of the enemy’s projectiles struck it, shards bursting across the desk as the circuits fizzled and died.
    Grant was still in the doorway to the mat-trans chamber behind Brigid, and she heard him call out one word—“Duck!”—before he began picking off the hooded strangers with rapid blasts from his own Sin Eater weapon, even as Kane hurried to help Domi.
    Brigid was in motion then, too, reaching for her own blaster where