Distortion Offensive (23 page)

“My father hurt me, Enia,” the child replied, and Brigid wondered at the name he had called her. “Tricked me and then discarded me, as if I had never been. My attachment to the Annunaki is broken. I have lost the collective memories.”

The Annunaki were an ancient and almost immortal race, who were said to hold all of the memories of their ancestors, Brigid recalled. It was this very shared existence that had engendered the stultifying boredom within them that in turn had caused them to come to Earth many millennia ago and begin tinkering in the
affairs of the primitive race that they had found there, the childlike race known as humanity.

The boy child was still speaking, his voice two separate things. “I need to learn where Enlil is, what it is he does. I need to know about my father,” he said.

Brigid clenched her fists as another book slipped from the child's fingers and fell into the flames, sparking and spitting as the pages curled up and burned away as cinders, sparkling in the air like a cloud of fireflies over swampland. In his actions, Ullikummis was destroying the Ontic Library, without even seeming to notice. How could she stop this, the destruction of all knowledge? How could a human archivist turn a god prince away?

 

G
RANT DUCKED AS THE
green-scaled fish creature rushed at him, its jaws clacking as they opened wide in their attempt to consume him. The monstrous fish flipped upon itself once more, just as he lined up another shot from his Copperhead, and Grant's blast went wild as his target literally disappeared.

The broad-shouldered ex-Mag took that moment to refocus himself, bringing his rapid breathing down to a more reasonable level, calming his racing heart. The eerie, undead creature could reappear at any moment, he knew; he just had to wait it out.

Just twenty feet away, the monstrous fish with the shattered head rushed at Kane, leaving wet, pus-filled footprints on the coral floor of the Ontic Library as its many wounds wept across the surface of its hideous frame. Kane took careful aim, struggling to decide what part of the ruined, devastated creature he should shoot to halt its progress. It was relentless, a dead thing come
back from the grave to attack again and again and again, an abomination made flesh.

Kane drilled a 9 mm bullet into the gaping wound where the creature's head had been, another into its flipperlike forepaw, and yet still it lumbered onward, picking up speed as its feet splattered against the floor spurting clouds of pus.

From nearby, Kane could hear the sounds of Grant's own blaster cease, as his partner struggled with an undead fish creature of his own.

Just then, from the corner of his eye, Kane saw a chartreuse shimmer in the air, like a falling leaf catching the sunlight, and another monster reappeared, slipping back into his field of vision as it swam relentlessly through the air toward him. Kane was knocked flat on his back, the breath bursting from his lungs as the reappearing creature crashed into his left knee, butting the ex-Magistrate off his feet.

Kane scampered backward as quickly as he could as he saw the other headless monster rushing toward him, its bare feet slapping at the coral floor. Just to his left, the first creature snapped its hideous double jaw, clamping down on empty air as Kane moved swiftly to keep himself out of its path.

The headless one lunged, but as Kane tried to avoid it, it found itself brought up short as one of its muscular hind limbs was pulled away from under it. The fish creature slammed against the hard floor with an almighty crack that reverberated loudly in the vastness of the colossal undersea chamber.

Standing behind the headless monster, Clem pulled back on the length of his homemade lasso as it snagged the creature's hind leg, yanking it backward. “No good going fishing without a line,” the oceanographer stated
as he reeled in his catch, pulling at the tape measure with a brisk hand-over-hand action.

The creature's short forelimbs pawed at the floor as Clem reeled it in, struggling to stop its backward progress. Clem shoved the heel of his shoe against the slimy, putrescent surface of the thing's writhing back as it flipped and flopped, pressing all his weight there as it tried desperately to escape.

Kane had no time to consider what was happening to his other foe, meanwhile; instead, he turned his attention to the other creature as it charged for him across the six feet that now separated them. With a swiftness that seemed almost inhuman, Kane brought up his Sin Eater and rammed it at the thing's open jaw, smashing the creature with such force that one of its protruding spines snapped in its mouth. Then the beast clamped that incredible jaw around the barrel of Kane's gun, the second pair of jaws shutting around the weapon like a set of double doors.

Heart pounding, Kane held down the pistol's trigger, unleashing a stream of bullets into the deadly creature's mouth. At the end of the barrel of the gun, the fearsome fish shook and rocked as the volley of bullets drilled into its innards.

“Take it and love it,” Kane growled at the creature, “'cause it's all you're getting from me.”

Nearby, Grant saw a sliver of scales reappear in midair as his own foe emerged from nothingness, darting through the air with a graceless wriggle of its tail-like hind legs. But now the beast was hurtling away from him, heading toward the hub that dominated the room.

“Good riddance,” Grant muttered as he watched the
thing scamper away, touching the floor in little bounding leaps as it scuttled from him.

Then something occurred to Grant, and he began sprinting after the creature as it surged away. It could be after Brigid—or even Ullikummis—where they were hooked into the weird organic library. If it managed to somehow disrupt either one of them, there was every chance that Brigid would be hurt or, worse, this whole “real” thing would be damaged.

“Here, Fido,” Grant growled as he chased the retreating form of the fish creature. “Grant's got a bone for you. Your own!”

As he spit out his threat, Grant unleashed another deadly volley of gunfire from his Copperhead, spraying the floor at the monster's feet. Miraculously, the green-skinned beast halted, skidding to a stop and leaping from the path of the bullets as they carpeted the coral floor before it.

Grant watched in increasing irritation as the beast turned back to him, piercing him with its swollen-eyed glare.

“Here we go again,” Grant muttered as the ugly mutant fish began to charge.

Inside the mental environment of the Ontic Library, Brigid Baptiste wrestled with her options, trying desperately to come up with a way to eject Ullikummis. Clem had crossed their knowledge streams so that they could interact, but the rest was up to her.

“My mother's still alive,” the child said in its young-old voice that sounded like the grating of stone on stone.

Ninlil, Brigid realized, the image brought to her own mind by the Ontic Library within which she was immersed.

And Brigid knew that Ninlil was now Balam's child, Little Quav, hidden but still vulnerable to this monster. Without wishing it, without any conscious will, a book dropped from the shelf beside Brigid, its pages open. She looked down, idly brushing her hair back from her face. There, in bold black lines, was an illustration of a scoop that could reach through the quantum ether, a time-trawling device that might be employed—Brigid felt sick—to snatch the child straight out of her hiding place in Agartha. As if, in thinking of Little Quav, the exceptional library had provided all of the answers.

And if she could call up that knowledge so easily, without even meaning to, what was to stop Ullikummis doing the same? What was to say he had not already done so?

I have to distract him,
Brigid realized.
And not just distract him—eject him.

Even as the thought came into her mind, the library began to offer her distractions heaped upon distractions, opening before her like the petals of a flower.

A hundred thousand diversions raced past her mind's eye, as Brigid struggled to retain the focus of what it was she was doing. Music and speed and bodies and blood, distractions of the flesh and of the spirit and the mind, distractions of simple chat and complex logic puzzles, distractions of sound and light, a flickering box in the corner of a room, people watching it as if they had no will of their own. Brigid saw a lone disk, as bright as the sun, swinging back and forth, captivating her mind before she could turn away.

“Stop!” she cried out, and the image ceased, disappearing from her head. She was returned then to the tableau of the library as she understood it, with its towering shelves and its desks and its pile of burning books, never increasing in size but never diminishing, black smoke charring the ceiling high above.

“So,” Brigid said, trying urgently to clear her mind, “you require information on your father…”

 

S
MOKE BEGAN TO POUR
from the green-scaled creature's mouth where it was still clamped to the end of Kane's Sin Eater handgun, and the bitter stench of cordite filled the air. Finally, the undead thing let go, its wicked twin jaws opening and its ruined head pulling away, smoke billowing from its gaping maw.

Despite the damage it had taken, the creature was not dead. Kane watched in amazement as it continued to move, in a slumping, rolling gait as if stunned.

Then, incredibly, the fish beast picked up speed and
spun over on itself once more, disappearing from view like a light bulb winking off. It wasn't so clean this time, seeming to flicker in afterimage for a few swishes of its tail before it had finally gone.

A short way across from Kane, Clem was struggling to hold the headless fish creature down, and was being bounced and jostled as the beast flipped beneath his foot. “Any chance of a little help?” he cried as he saw Kane scanning the room for his foe.

Kane held up his free hand in silent reply as he waited for the other mutant fish to reappear. Suddenly Clem was tossed free of the monster he had trapped with his homemade lasso, and Kane watched as the oceanographer toppled backward and cracked his skull against the ground with a loud clap.

“Dammit, Clem,” Kane growled to himself, “couldn't you just stick to admiring the shells?”

Kane took to a brisk run as the headless monstrosity struggled to pull off the lasso encircling its leg. As it worked at the tape measure, nosing at it though it no longer had anything resembling a nose, Kane kicked it in the side so that it rolled over, feet in the air.

“One…” Kane snarled, unleashing a burst of fire into the open wound of the beast.

“And two,” he continued as the other weird fish creature reappeared a little way across the room.

The headless thing finally keeled over, the energy leaving it at last. Its body had been so punished that it barely resembled anything now, just a mess of gore and body parts, black holes where bullets had sprayed it and the glistening metal ends of several bullets visible among the sickening, bloody debris of its torso and head.

Kane sprinted across the room, chasing after the other genetically modified fish.

 

G
RANT'S SHOTS WERE BLASTING
wildly as the fish rushed toward him once more, leaping into the air and flipping over itself to disappear. Grant continued shooting, hoping against hope that he could fell this abomination when it reappeared. Then it was upon him, and there was nothing else he could do but lumber back with the weight of the beast and the impact of its driving body as it slammed into him, seemingly from nowhere.

Retaining his balance, Grant hoisted the hefty creature over his shoulder, slamming it to the floor as its vicious-looking jaws snapped shut.

The Copperhead in his hand blasted three rounds at point-blank range as Grant slammed the weapon against the ugly beast's torso. Its body jerked as it took the bullets, each one piercing its armorlike plating at the same spot.

Blood spurted then from its jaws, bursting forth in a sickening gush of crimson.

“Nobody likes a guest who won't take a hint,” Grant growled at it as he saw Kane rushing past, chasing his own quarry. “Now, get your coat and leave.”

The fish at Grant's side shuddered, its tail-like legs flapping as it struggled to right itself. Standing over it, Grant blasted another burst of bullets in its face, watching as it rocked under their impact, the stench of cordite heavy in the air now.

Finally the creature spurted out a slimy trail from its side and, despite flinching in staggered, spastic motions, seemed to finally cease its attempts to attack. It wasn't dead, Grant knew, but then—if Clem was right—it had never really been alive. Perhaps the best way to
think of it was that now, like a machine, it was out of commission.

Grant took to his heels as he chased after Kane, who raced toward the looming inverted-funnel shape of the hub in pursuit of the last of the fish creatures. Grant peered behind him for a split second, saw Clem lying unconscious beside the bloody corpse of the third fish, but at least nothing new was emerging from the dark access hatches. If there had been more, perhaps these savage things had already killed them, turning on one another in the millennia that they had remained down here unguarded. Or perhaps Ullikummis had killed them, disposing of their corpses before the Cerberus warriors had arrived.

“This has to be the worst fishing trip I've ever been on,” Grant growled as he chased after Kane and his quarry.

“Go around,” Kane instructed, seeing his partner rushing after him. “Stop it getting to the hub.”

Grant didn't need telling twice. With adrenaline pumping through his veins, he urged more speed from his legs, sprinting toward the towering, octopuslike thing that dominated the vast chamber while Kane continued to drill shot after shot in the retreating beast's path. The fish creature reared back at Kane's shots, leaping away as the coral around its feet splintered apart with the relentless impact of each 9 mm slug.

Head down, Grant ran onward, his breath coming harder now as he forced his aching muscles to keep going. The tails of his coat whipped out behind him as he ran at an angle, coming around on the far side of the creature as Kane closed in on it.

Kane ejected an empty clip from his Sin Eater and, as the fish creature watched him warily, brought another
from the ammo pouch at his belt and slapped it in place. The whole reloading process took less than three seconds, a practiced move so natural it was nothing more than muscle memory at work now. Years before, both Kane and Grant had found themselves in potentially lethal situations when they had been Magistrates in Cobaltville; there, a Mag's ability to reload quickly could mean the difference between life and death.

Kane raised his pistol, trigger already locked, blasting a stream of steel jackets at the gruesome, blood-smeared thing before him. The bullets cut through the air, driving against the fish creature's natural body armor, many of them flying off at all angles in bursts of light amid the gloom. Still, some were having an effect, finding chinks now in that awful solid skin that the creature wore.

The wounded creature looked nonplussed, rearing away from Kane as bullets dug into its flesh. It turned, feet pounding against the floor as if to run. Once it leaped, Kane knew, it could double on itself and disappear from vision. Somehow he needed to keep the thing grounded.

At that instant, Grant was across from Kane, circling around to trap the monstrous fish, ensuring that it had nowhere else to go. “You about ready to finish this thing?” Grant shouted over the echoing sounds of gunfire.

“More than ready,” Kane assured his partner as Grant raised the Copperhead and unleashed its full destructive power at the wounded monster flipping in the air, the bullets driving at the incredible rate of 700 rounds per minute, riddling the air above so that it could not jump.

As bullets lashed at the decaying creature's body
from all sides, Kane and Grant watched emotionlessly as it flopped to the floor, staggered and slumped, sinking on the floor amid chunks of its own flesh.

An instant later, Grant and Kane ceased fire.

The weird creature appeared—finally—to be dead.

Gradually, the Copperhead still held ready in case the creature so much as flinched, Grant made his way around to Kane's side.

“You okay?” Kane asked, his own weapon still poised in his hand.

“Remind me never to piss off any more undead fish,” Grant rumbled.

 

W
ITHIN THE MIND-BOMB
of knowledge that was the Ontic Library, Brigid struggled as she tried to come up with a way to stop Ullikummis from destroying everything, find how to turn him away.

He trusted her, she realized. Whatever it was he saw there, it wasn't Brigid Baptiste. He had called her Enia—a code? A name from his past, perhaps?

Brigid held out her hand to the little boy, smiling benignly as she encouraged him to join her. “This is a big place, little man. You're in the wrong section,” she said.

Ullikummis, the strange boy with the volcanic eyes, reached for her hand and grasped it in his. Though his hand looked small, like a child's, it felt like rock, cold and lifeless. Cognitive dissonance, once again, Brigid realized—the act of simultaneously holding two opposing beliefs about a thing.

The boy followed as Brigid led the way away from the fire, letting it burn as it would.

There had been the time loop, and there had been
Abi, and even this library didn't really exist, not in the way that Brigid perceived it right now at least. If she could use the power of the Ontic Library to shape things, then she could use it to make things; new things that never were, things like her niece Abi and the vase with the dog on its side.

She willed it then. Brigid dug deep in her own thoughts as she followed the length of the bookcases, the boy's hand in hers, and she thought about the outside of the library, and how it would look and smell and feel, how the wind would play across its bricks and gutters and vast windowpanes. She walked toward the sunlight that rippled on the windows, and she imagined a thing beyond them, a door into the garden that surrounded the library in her mind, a door into summer.

“Almost there now, little man,” Brigid promised as she felt the child tugging away from her. “Just a little farther.”

The boy looked up at her hopefully, his inhuman eyes glowing like twin pools of lava.

“Just a little farther,” Brigid repeated, a friendly, motherly smile on her lips.

When they reached it, the door was there, just as Brigid had imagined it. A double doorway of glass, French doors leading out onto the paving of a patio.

“Where are we?” Ullikummis the child asked.

“There's the best book out here,” Brigid assured him, and she led the way into the garden, where bees buzzed and the scent of orchids lay heavy in the air.

She knew then, just for a second, that he didn't want to go. Ullikummis was resisting her suggestion; he was looking around frantically, wondering at where he was.

For the briefest instant, she saw the library as he
perceived it, a dead rock pyramid spinning in space, the books like ancient tablets of stone. And, for just a second, she saw her hand as he saw it, shimmering scales of crimson flushed with pink.

“All the information is right here,” Brigid said, and when Ullikummis turned to where she indicated, he saw the lone book that rested on a picnic blanket laid out on the grass by the roses, the book that Brigid had generated from everything she knew, forcing it to manifest as a physical thing. Had the library helped her to do this, guided her hand somehow, in its need for self-preservation? Was she, in fact, the library's hand in darkness? She couldn't say.

Ullikummis let go of her hand and ran for the book, his short legs skipping through the bright green grass.

Brigid stepped back into the archive building and gently closed the doors, turning the lock once to seal the Annunaki prince outside. And as he opened the book, she saw the look of horror snap across his child's face, and Brigid Baptiste, willing tool of the Ontic Library, knew that she had to turn away.