Distortion Offensive (14 page)

 

A
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OMI HURRIED UP
the mud steps toward the road that Philboyd was indicating over the Commtact link, the man's voice came to her again.

“Domi, we may have a problem,” Philboyd stated from his position at the Cerberus redoubt in Montana.

“Go ahead, Cerberus,” Domi instructed, her hand automatically reaching to check that her Detonics Combat Master handgun was still in its holster at her hip.

“Edwards's transponder just flatlined,” Brewster explained. “He's either lost consciousness or—”

“Don't say it, Brewster,” Domi ordered. “I'll be there soon enough.” As she hurried up the steep steps, Domi just hoped that wasn't as ambitious a statement as it sounded to her own ears right now.

Roughly twelve miles beneath the surface of the Pacific, two Cerberus Manta craft glided gracefully through the water toward the cruciform structure that waited at the bottom of the sea. After their tangle with the giant squidlike creatures, both pilots remained alert and cautious of what was going on all around them, and the tension in the cockpits of both vehicles was acute.

The whole approach was done using the heads-up sensor display and guided by an automated system that seemed to already know the position and entry route for the docking gateway that resided on one side of the immense coral-like cross.

Sitting behind Grant in the tiny passenger seat of the compact cockpit, Clem let out a long sigh of relief as he peered through the slit windows at the near total darkness.

Hearing this, Grant offered a note of reassurance. “Almost there now, Clem,” he said.

“I feel like we just went ten rounds with the kraken of legend,” the oceanographer said, sounding genuinely exhausted.

Grant loosed a single, sharp bark of laughter as he guided the Manta along the final approach. He could see from the sensor display that Kane was following in his own craft and there were no more sea monsters out
there—at least for now. “Brigid called them librarians,” Grant explained.

It was Clem's turn to laugh then, and it was the fulsome sound of relief. “The kraken was a fearsome beast, a sea monster,” he explained, “that was said to roam the oceans around Norway and Iceland. Modern interpretations suggest that the kraken really was some kind of giant squid that generally made its home in the ocean depths.”

“Sounds like our librarian, all right,” Grant agreed.

Clem shook his head in astonishment, though Grant was too busy concentrating on the controls to see. “You're completely unfazed,” Clem said in amazement. “You—the three of you—do this kind of thing a lot, don't you?”

“Define ‘a lot,'” Grant replied as the Manta floated through a wide, coral archway within the cruciform structure.

A moment later they found themselves dipping even lower as Grant followed the tunnel beyond the archway, keeping to a slow, steady pace as his sensor array began bringing up reams of new information.

“Have entered some kind of tunnel construction,” Grant informed Kane over the Commtact.

Kane's voice came back a moment later: “I've got your back, buddy. Entering the structure now.”

The tunnel continued to sink, dropping at a thirty-degree angle as it burrowed beneath the ocean bed. Peering through the back windowpanes, Clem was delighted to see that the walls were visible, lit sporadically by some kind of phosphorescent moss that grew upon the walls in shades of pinks and orange-reds, the color of a peach's skin.

“It looks like a magical grotto,” Clem said in wonder.

Up ahead of him, Grant peered past the heads-up display information, looking through the windshield at the otherworldly sight of the cavern that they were slowly traveling through. Clem was right; it really did look like something magical, like an illustration from a child's storybook. The tunnel's uneven walls seemed to twinkle with the strange lighting as the Manta followed its mysterious path.

“Do you realize,” Clem said, the reverence clear in his tone, “that we are probably deeper beneath the ocean than any human has ever been?”

Grant eased up a little on the thrust to the engines, letting the Manta glide as the tunnel began to rise steeply once again. A moment later they found themselves emerging from the water in what appeared to be a vast cavern, filled with air and once again lit by the strange glowing lichen that clung to the walls in its obscure patterns. The cavern featured a huge circular pool in its center from which the Manta had emerged, with a border of flattened rock at its edges that led to an opening on the far side of the cave, its entryway approximately six feet across. To Grant's surprise, there were three Manta craft already waiting at the edges of the pool, their blisterlike cockpits drawn back and showing them to be unoccupied.

Grant examined the opening at the far end of the cavern, allowing the sensors to judge its width. “Too small for us to fit through,” he muttered. “Looks like this is where we get out and walk.”

“Excellent,” Clem announced buoyantly. “I could do with stretching my legs.”

Grant brought the Manta around, edging it on vertical
jets toward a spot against one rocky wall, away from the other docked Mantas, before bringing it to rest in the water. The water here was shallower, and Grant felt the bottom of the Manta's hull clunk lightly against a shelf that was hidden just a few feet beneath the water's surface. The shelf was at the perfect height to allow the Manta's wings to rest level with the rock circle that bordered the room, as if it had been designed as a kind of docking bay for these ancient craft of Annunaki design.

As Grant eased the Manta to a resting position, Kane's vehicle emerged from the circular pool, water streaming off its sleek lines as the red-orange light glistened off its mirror-bronzed surface.

“Docking bay,” Grant explained over the Commtact link as Kane brought his Manta out of the water, hovering in place for a few seconds.

“So I see,” Kane replied over the medium of the Commtact.

Inside his own Manta craft, hovering just a few feet above the surface of the water, Kane allowed the sensitive scanning equipment to analyze the cavern and what it could “see” beyond its walls.

“I'm picking up a nebulous reading of a lot of life-forms,” Kane stated, “but the details seem unclear.”

“It looks like a coral reef, a living habitat,” Brigid stated from behind Kane's head, peering through the slit windows to either side of her seat. “We're likely to find a lot of things making their homes here.”

Then, following Grant's lead, Kane brought his Manta down on the hidden shelf that surrounded the rim of the pool, taking one last look at the area through the complex scanning equipment aboard his craft.

Once he had landed, Kane removed his helmet and
opened the cockpit seal. Then he and Brigid made their way down one sloped wing of the craft and out onto the rocky border that circled the room. Already disembarked, Grant and Clem waited by the wing of their own craft while their colleagues made their way over to join them. Grant was checking the damage his vehicle had taken in the meeting with the colossal librarians, relieved to see just a few dents and scrapes. They'd been lucky.

Grant wore his favored Kevlar trenchcoat over his shadow suit, while Clem had added a padded jacket over his Cerberus jumpsuit, and he pulled the wings of the collar tight to his neck, staving off the cold of the cavern. In fact, despite being roughly twelve miles beneath the surface of the sea, the temperature in the grotto was surprisingly mild, just a little cooler than normal room temperature. Additionally, there was no breeze in the area at all, which seemed slightly peculiar for some unidentifiable reason.

The Mantas had been designed as space-faring craft, and their sensors had automatically informed their pilots that they were reentering a breathable atmosphere before opening the cockpit seals.

“At least we can breathe,” Kane said as he deeply inhaled the atmosphere through his nostrils.

“Guess the lizards didn't like getting wet,” Grant observed sullenly as he stared around the cavern. He had never been comfortable discussing the intricacies of Annunaki society or technology.

As Brigid joined them, Grant acknowledged her with a grim nod. “Hell of a slick move back there,” Grant told her by way of thanks.

The Titian-haired woman acknowledged his thanks with a self-conscious smile before indicating the three
abandoned craft within the cavern. “Someone else on the guest list?” she asked.

Clem narrowed his eyes as he looked at the docked Mantas in the pale light of the cavern. “If there is, they arrived a long time before we did,” he said. “There are barnacles on the bottoms of the hulls, see?”

The other Cerberus warriors followed Clem's eye line, seeing the lumpy growths along the waterline of the sleek craft. The bronze metal had turned to green in ugly patches, too, and on closer examination, each craft appeared to be in a state of disrepair.

“Guess they've been here a while,” Kane agreed.

“Their pilots are probably long since dead, then,” Clem proposed jauntily.

“Could have been dead ten thousand years or more,” Grant said, bringing his Copperhead assault subgun out of a hidden recess in his coat, and scanning the cavern and its sole above-water entry point warily. “Still, I'd rather we keep our eyes open just in case they're not.”

Kane powered his own weapon, the Sin Eater pistol, into his hand from its hidden wrist holster. “Annunaki live for a long time,” he reminded Clem. “Keep behind me.”

With that, Kane led the way into the entryway tunnel that led from the docking pool.

Warily, the Cerberus field team made its way from the area that they had deemed the docking bay and into a corridor that stretched off into the main area of the undersea complex. The corridor was quite narrow, too tight for all four to walk abreast, and so Kane took the lead, his Sin Eater handgun clutched ready in his right hand. Though tight, the sides of the corridor stretched quite high, towering to almost fourteen feet above them, and narrowing to an archlike point that ran along its
center. It was low lit, small pods glowing an eerie blue amid the structure of the walls themselves, and the light was too erratically spaced and too dim to cast firm shadows, instead rendering everything into a vague, foggy sort of blandness. Close up, the walls and floor seemed to be made of dried coral, and Kane was struck by its uncomfortable similarity to bone.

“Feels a little like an ossuary,” Grant grumbled as he entered the corridor archway, bringing up the rear of the group. “Smells like one, too.”

Grant clutched his Copperhead assault rifle, a fiercely powerful weapon and one of his favorites when in the field, purely because of its ease of use and the sheer level of rapid destruction it could bring. The grip and trigger of the gun were placed in front of the breech in the bullpup design, allowing the weapon to be used single-handed, and an optical, image-intensified scope coupled with a laser autotargeter were mounted on top of the frame. The Copperhead possessed a 700-round-per-minute rate of fire and was equipped with an extended magazine holding thirty-five 4.85 mm steel-jacketed rounds. Besides the Copperhead subgun, Grant also wore his own Sin Eater pistol in a responsive wrist holster like Kane's, where it could be called to his hand with the speed of thought.

Striding between the two ex-Mags, Brigid and Clem kept their wits about them, but showed more interest in the nature of the corridor itself. Clem especially was fascinated by the suggestion of sea life that he saw here. “An ossuary might not be so far from the truth,” he proposed, running a gloved hand along the wall to his left. “I rather suspect that the foundation for this structure could in fact be a skeleton.”

Kane glanced behind him for a moment, a look of
irritation furrowing his brow. “It'd be one hell of a big skeleton, Clem,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“Those things we saw outside—the librarians—were creatures of exceptional magnitude,” Clem reminded Kane.

Brigid pondered the walls for a moment, keeping her pace up as she followed Kane along the eerie, softly lit corridor. “If it is a skeleton,” she said, “then it died a long, long time ago. The coral that's grown up here looks to be several feet thick.”

Clem shrugged. “Things die all the time, Brigid,” he said.

As they continued to make their way down the corridor, their footsteps echoing softly amid the dulling sound of water, Grant spotted something from the corner of his eye. He turned, automatically bringing the Copperhead subgun around to track whatever it was that had drawn his attention.

“Everything okay, partner?” Kane called back to him, halting in his own progress. His own senses were on high alert, and something nagged at the edge of Kane's consciousness; it felt as if he was being watched.

Grant stood stock-still for a moment, his eyes narrowed as he examined the wall before him in the dim light. Its bumps and ridges were like valleys, a miniature landscape full of peaks and caves. Three feet away from where he had stopped, one of the blue lights flickered a little and then, utterly soundless, it winked out.

“Grant?” Kane asked from along the corridor.

“Fine,” Grant growled, lowering his blaster and turning away from the uneven wall.

The others began making their way along the narrow corridor, but even as Grant turned, there came a sound
like needles dropping onto glass from very close to his left ear.

Grant turned, but he was almost too late to see the thing in the semidarkness. Something skittered across the surface of the coral, something no bigger than Grant's fist and with an abundance of long, whirring legs that propelled it along at incredible speed. “Whoa!” Grant cried as, in flinch reaction, he leaped back from the wall.

His companions turned at their friend's outburst and saw him jump sideways until he met with the wall on the other side of the narrow corridor. Grant spun then, looking left and right at the wall he had automatically propelled himself against. “There's something alive here,” he shouted to Kane and the others.