Part 5 - Roots of the ET Mess
Continued from Part 4
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After Ninurta's nuclear blast sealed the entrance to Anzu's underground base, he and his Wingmen turned on Ninurta's fleet and engaged them in a battle that rained fire and debris over a wide area: Anzu's ships were better suited to use in the atmosphere than Ninurta's interstellar fleet, but again fortune was with Ninurta in the form of a plasma beam device that he had been using for mining survey work. He charged the device - now a weapon - and in one well-programmed sweep, he cut half of Anzu's Wingmen from the sky. The device took a long time to recharge, however, and Ninurta soon found himself engaged at close range, as Anzu, now feeling pinched, counted on his Wingmen's superior flying skills to turn the tide of the battle against Ninurta's interstellar fleet, none of whom were accustomed to tight maneuvering or maintaining tactical battle formations. The aggressive move worked. Soon Anzu had Ninurta boxed into a clump of his own ships, and Ninurta knew his death was imminent. Then a piece of Anzu's ship broke away explosively and tipped the main body of the ship into his closest Wingman. The collision stripped airfoils and maneuvering thrusters from both ships and they spiraled Earthwards.
The battle ended abruptly as Anzu's craft left a fiery trail through the Earth's atmosphere; Wingmen scattered to the stars, leaving Ninurta to taste a new kind of failure. Even as luck had given him victory in battle, it had denied him the prize that his father had promised him: the Tablets of Destiny, the greatest treasure of the Anunaki, was plummeting Earthward in a ball of flame. Ninurta did the only thing he could: he began to reform his fleet to perform a salvage operation. He almost missed the flash of gold that streaked through the violet haze half a hemisphere away: it was the Sparrowhawk, Enki's tiny personal craft. The delicate ship frictionlessly pierced the atmosphere and swiftly followed a trajectory that intersected with the piece of Anzu's ship that had blown away. The realization came to Enlil's son too late, but when it did, his stomach twisted into a hard knot as he watched the Sparrowhawk capture the debris. The blown-away piece must have been the ship's survival capsule - no doubt explosively separated on purpose by one of Enki's agents who had stowed away on Anzu's ship. With sick certainty that the Tablets of Destiny were in that capsule, Ninurta watched helplessly as for a second time he lost his prize.
Safely away from Ninurta, Enki concealed the Sparrowhawk in the shadow of an asteroid and dropped into the below-deck where the capsule from Anzu's ship floated in the anti-gravity field that had captured it. Moments later, he had the pod open and discovered the source of the mysterious signal he had received: one of the slaves Damkina had left behind when she left and he had freed, the one who had been trying to reorganize the Life Laboratory after Damkina stripped it of working equipment and senior researchers. She showed signs of a recent beating. In her bruised arms was a crumpled bundle of packing material with a black corner sticking out: true to the message she had sent, she had the Tablets of Destiny. Wordlessly, she handed the bundle to him and climbed out of the capsule only to faint when she entered the Sparrowhawk's artificial gravity.
Enlil was ranting to An about how Enki had engineered the whole escapade when Ninurta walked into the Council Hall with the Tablets of Destiny and a peculiar expression on his face. An noted this as he accepted the Tablets from his grandson and restored them to their proper places in the information architecture of Nibiru. They seemed undamaged and An praised Ninurta and rewarded him with the task of reforming the Wings that had been under Anzu's command. Enlil demanded that Enki be punished, and Anzu, if found alive, be executed. Reluctantly, An agreed, and issued orders to seize both Enki and his former best friend.
On the Sparrowhawk, the girl, Ma'ah, regained consciousness and told Enki her side of the story. Anzu, during his last troublesome visit to Eridu, had broken into the Life Laboratories, looking for some information Damkina apparently had accidentally left behind, information Ma'ah had already found and had passed to Isimud - the records that had just days earlier allowed Enki to successfully defend himself from Damkina's attempt to seize half of Eridu as part of their divorce. Ma'ah spoke quietly as she described how Anzu and six of his Wingmen had entered the Life Laboratory in the pre-dawn hours when they expected no one to be there, and she had summoned the Erin guard before they found her and dragged her out of her hiding place. The guard arrived just in time to stop Anzu's attack on her - the one that had been reported to Enki and caused him to expel Anzu and the Wingmen from Eridu. She told of An's summons to Nibiru, and how she had testified directly to the Anunaki leader in private session regarding the contents of the records and her experiences as Damkina's personal slave. Her testimony had been damning, and only then did Enki begin to realize the depth of the conspiracy against him.
Ma'ah continued to tell how she had been spotted and abducted by the Wingmen as she was preparing to return to Eridu, and had been imprisoned on Anzu's ship. Anzu had stopped in briefly to tell her he intended to finish what he started, kill her, and dump her body in deep space, but when the battle with Ninurta began, the systems that had been holding her helpless failed and she escaped into the ship. She stumbled across the Tablets of Destiny and recognized them from her audience with An, correctly guessed that Anzu had stolen them, and she took them with her. She found the escape capsule, locked herself inside, sent the distress message to Enki, and triggered the explosive separation of the capsule that saved Ninurta by causing Anzu's ship to crash. Ma'ah ended her testimony to Enki with a bombshell: while she languished in the paralysis field, she had overheard Anzu speaking with someone about a rendezvous. When that conversation ended, Anzu spoke with his subcommander about using the rendezvous to catch Enlil off-guard and destroy him.
Enlil continued to press his advantage with An and convinced him to strip Enki of command of Eridu and give it instead to Ninurta, the hero who defeated Anzu and rescued the Tablets of Destiny. An, in private session, ran a simulation on the Tablets to discover likely causal effects of this decision, and discovered that they were behaving oddly. The artificial intelligence within them seemed different...younger, less experienced, and much less mystical. An held this knowledge and his suspicion to himself, and instead gave every outward appearance of going along with Enlil's recommendations.
Enki's people on Nibiru passed a message to him to let him know that An had issued a seizure order against him, so Enki took the Sparrowhawk into a hyperspatial manifold while he thought through what to do next. During this time, his respect for Ma'ah deepened into genuine affection, affection that was returned equally. Enki returned to Nibiru certain that he was going to have to fight for his reputation and for his vision for the future of Earth, and resolved to do so. The thought of what Enlil's dominion would mean to humankind and hybrids like Ma'ah horrified him, and he swore to oppose that dominion until it was overthrown.
Enlil left Nibiru certain of victory over Enki, and flew straight into Lilitu's arms. The reptilians hailed his triumphant return, and in his address to them, he laid out his vision of the future: a program by which the Anunaki race was entirely re-engineered to reptilian perfection, the lineage of succession restored to the pure "godly" bloodline (his). It was in this speech that he traced his lineage back to God Himself and announced His Own Return and Universal Sovereignty over both Anunaki and reptilians, whom he renamed the "Kingu'ru" or "royal serpents." (1) A small group of reptilian separatists, led by the former supreme commander (Lillith's former lover and Lilitu's father), opposed Enlil and were brutally slaughtered to the last family and clan member.
Next: An finishes waking up but finds himself hamstrung by his own rules, Enki is forced out of Eridu, and Enlil's protégés go native.
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(1) Pronounced "key-nnnngooo-[soft glottal stop]-ru." Royal serpents" was probably inspired as a deliberate insult to Enki and Enki's mother, who was a member of a transdimensional race known only as the "snake people." Enlil never spared an opportunity to snobbishly look down on his father's liaison with the Snake Ambassador or his elder half-brother who resulted from that union. It was as if Enlil, whose pure Anunaki genes gave him the superior position in inheritance from his father under the traditional system, was somehow trying to reinforce this position by saying "look, I have my serpents, too, and mine are here and under my active command."
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