There are no moving vehicles, no traffic, yet the city is teeming with life. Tens of thousands of people—Homo sapiens, but for their elongated skulls, move about the hive of alien humanity with an overriding sense of purpose and joy.

For a wondrous moment, Mick’s consciousness is bathed in love.

And then something monstrous happens.

As the distant fireball of Mintaka sets, the placid ocean begins churning. Ominous olive and bloodred clouds race across the darkening sky as the swirling vortex below builds to unfathomable proportions.

Mick watches as a lead gray ooze seeps out of the center of the maelstrom, the contaminated elixir inundating the pristine coastline, the tide rising higher, higher, until it infiltrates the city of the Nephilim.

His consciousness registers a demonic presence.

Darkness descends upon the city, spreading like the shadow of a great serpent upon the Edenlike world. Terrified humanoids drop to the ground, clutching their throats, their eyes transforming into vacant, pupilless pools of black.

The images overwhelm him. Once more, his consciousness blacks out.

Mick reopens his eyes.

What was once a civilization of magnificent beauty has now been transformed into a monstrous alien shipyard. Nephilim zombies, their faces ashen and expressionless, their eyes, vacant black holes, hover motionless in midair as their enslaved minds manipulate titanic iridium plates with invisible hands onto the skeletal framework of an ungodly seven-mile-diameter spherical hull. At the core of the vessel is a central pod—a one-mile-diameter nerve center equipped with twenty-three tubular limbs.

Situated within this sphere, harnessed amidst a myriad of alien conduits is a three-hundred-foot-long life-support pod. Mick focuses on the abominable object, recognizing it immediately.

Tezcatilpoca’s chamber …

And then a deep chill washes over Mick’s consciousness, as his mind’s eye struggles to grasp the alien being emerging from within the vortex of the still-swirling maelstrom.

It is a serpent, but like none he has ever seen. The viperous face is more devil than beast, its pupils—vertical slits of gold, surrounded by incandescent crimson corneas more cybernetic than organic. The skull is as large as the mixer on a cement truck, the creature’s girth as long as four city buses aligned bumper to bumper.

Mick’s vantage changes as the serpent approaches the Nephilim complex. The jowls of the great beast open, revealing rows of ebony, scalpel-sharp teeth.

Stepping out from the serpent’s jaws—a humanoid.

A shadow of death seems to pass over Mick’s soul. He cannot see the man’s face, the head and body being cloaked in a black shroud, but he knows he is gazing upon pure evil. The humanoid moves toward the life-support chamber, then extends an arm, pointing. Glowing within the man’s hand is a jade object, about the size of a football.

The vermilion eyes of the serpent glitter, the golden pupils disappearing. The blinded creature, mesmerized by the small object, follows the cloaked being as if under a spell.