Outlanders 64 - Savage Dawn by James Axler

Author:James Axler
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2012-07-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Kane was on the morning watch, the last round of sleep for the long traveling explorers and their ally. The grasslands, surrounded by a crown of mountaintops as far as the eye could see, were beautiful. His one regret was that in a land of eternal sun, there was no way to see the beauty of the dawn.

It was no wonder that Kondo’s people had once more driven themselves into subterranean tunnels. Without the diurnal-nocturnal cycle of life, the human mind and body, even those enhanced such as the Watatsumi and the Nagah, needed darkness. Underground, it was easier to bring in light than to cast the shadow of night under the relentless glow of the lava tubes.

He checked his map, having updated it with information from Kondo’s and Remus’s directions. They were several hours away from the entrance to Ryugo-jo. Most of the people lived in the honeycombed depths of the steppe near the edge, where a semblance of volcanic activity had created more tubes and tunnels, caverns through which the city of the dragon men could spread out.

He’d assumed it was artificial volcanic activity that had formed this tableland overlooking the rest of the thick rain forest sprawling outward like a flowing Victorian-era skirt. The ground that this pocket of prehistory had been carved in was the inside of a bubble of high-density basalt. Actual volcanic activity came from fissures and fractures in the lighter, thinner granite, where the glowing hot blood of Earth, magma, tried to expand toward cooler, less heavily packed exits.

For all the natural appearance of this lost world, still thousands of miles from Earth’s core, it was not real. From the cockpit of his Manta, he could make out the token changes of environments, the shifts from rain forest to desert to inland seas. In the distance, hundreds of miles from the tiara of jagged peaks surrounding the plateau, he’d spotted an ugly, cloud-choked primordial hell, one that Remus had described as harkening back to an age before aerobic, oxygen-breathing life had taken to the surface of Earth.

“But there are living creatures in that toxic mist,” Remus had promised. “The foulest of horrors, only barely imagined in the time of man.”

The peculiar realm, carved by otherworldly technology and populated with samples of life from across the spectrum of the planet’s existence, reminded Kane of the scope of the enemy that they had routed. Though Tiamat slept a dreamless sleep, stricken by deep, brutal injuries in the initial near destruction of the Annunaki bitch queen Lilitu, sometime, millions of years hence, the giant would awaken from its healing coma.

Lilitu herself had shown that the death of her Annunaki body was scarcely a hindrance to her continued plotting, especially since the overlords had been scattered by the same fiasco that had rendered the leviathan ship lame. Her essence had been divided, the shadows of her existence injected into three women.

“We can fight them tooth and nail, but still, we can’t erase their manipulations from our world,” he whispered.

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