Distortion Offensive (5 page)

Mariah looked at him with wide blue eyes. “Is there a difference?”

Lakesh took the chunk of gray rock in one hand and meaneuvered it across the desk, using its sharp edges like feet. “Consider a puppeteer,” he suggested, “bring
ing his creations to life. Are they alive or is their life merely illusory?”

Mariah smiled. “I take your point.” She was about to say something else when the public-address system burst to life, and Donald Bry's voice came over the speakers, calling Lakesh back to the ops center. Lakesh initiated the comm unit on Mariah's desk and asked Donald what the situation was.

“We have a visitor,” Bry explained, his voice sounding as urgent as ever. “One you'll want to meet. I think you should come right away.”

Lakesh excused himself, and Mariah watched the elderly cyberneticist leave the laboratory and hurry off down the corridor. Alone once more, she looked around her, wondering whether she'd been wasting her time these past few days trying to find something that wasn't there. As Lakesh had said, maybe the rocks were just puppets, and Ullikummis their puppeteer.

Something dawned on her then, and she struggled to suppress the shudder that ran up her spine. She had seen the great stone form of Ullikummis pushed into a viciously hot furnace and suffer the fate that he had intended for her and others who had failed in his harsh training regime. His body had been reduced to ash in a half minute, superheated until it was incinerated to nothingness. But his body was stone. And if his body was stone, a thing that he controlled and shaped with such ease, might it not also be possible that he had replaced himself with a double as he stepped into those flames? Could it be that he had pulled a switch and cheated death?

“I've been sniffing test tubes too long,” Mariah muttered, shaking her head. It was time to take a walk and
get a cup of coffee. Maybe she could get one in the cafeteria and find out what Clem was up to.

Slowly, Mariah Falk reached across the desk for the crutch that rested against it. Then she eased herself up and, using the crutch to support her left leg, slowly hop-walked to the door and out toward the cafeteria. Mariah had taken a bullet to her left calf during the final assault on Ullikummis, and the pain still sang through her leg with every movement, despite the painkillers she had been prescribed.

“That bullet saved your life,” she reminded herself as she struggled along the windowless corridor of the redoubt toward the elevator that would take her up to the facility's cafeteria. “Brave heart, girlfriend. They say you're not a real Cerberus operative until you've taken a bullet.”

 

T
HE
C
ERBERUS REDOUBT,
originally a military facility, had remained forgotten or ignored in the two centuries since the nukecaust. In the years since that nuclear devastation, a strange mythology had grown up around the mountains, their dark, foreboding forests and seemingly bottomless ravines. The wilderness area surrounding the redoubt was virtually unpopulated. The nearest settlement was to be found in the flatlands some miles away, consisting of a small band of Indians, Sioux and Cheyenne, led by a shaman named Sky Dog.

Tucked beneath camouflage netting, hidden away within the rocky clefts of the mountains, concealed uplinks chattered continuously with two orbiting satellites that provided much of the empirical data for Lakesh and his team. Gaining access to the satellites had taken many hours of intense trial-and-error work by the top scientists on hand at the base. Less than a month ago,
both satellites had been damaged in a freak meteor shower, and the people of the Cerberus operation suddenly found themselves cut off from the outside world and feeling very vulnerable. Thankfully the satellites had been repaired so that Lakesh and his team could draw on live feeds from the orbiting Vela-class reconnaissance satellite and the Keyhole Comsat once again. But the fraught period of blackout had served to remind the Cerberus team how much they had come to rely on technology. Delays associated with satellite communication notwithstanding, their arrangement gave the people of Cerberus a near limitless stream of feed data surveying the surface of the planet, as well as the ability to communicate with field teams, such as Kane's team in Hope, in near real time.

Hidden away as it was, the redoubt required few active measures to discourage visitors. It was almost unheard-of for strangers to come to the main entry, a rollback door located on a plateau high on the mountain. Instead, most people accessed the redoubt either by Sandcat personnel carrier or the miraculous Manta craft that Kane and his field team currently employed, or via the teleportational mat-trans system housed within the redoubt itself.

The mat-trans had been developed toward the end of the twentieth century as a means to transport military personnel and equipment across the vast United States of America. Employing a quantum window, the mat-trans worked through the principle of a sender and a receiver unit, utilizing point-to-point transfer of matter through teleportation. Though eminently adaptable, the system was limited by the number and location of the mat-trans units.

More recently, the Cerberus personnel had discovered
an alien designed system that functioned along similar principles, but relied on a naturally occurring network of energy centers called parallax points. These parallax points existed across the globe and beyond, and could be exploited by use of a device called an interphaser, which was portable enough to be carried by one person in an attaché-style case. The interphaser was limited in other ways, not the least of which was the location of the parallax points, but proved a more flexible system to operate, bypassing the fixed location limitations of the mat-trans network, and no longer limiting the team to primarily U.S.-based locales.

The Cerberus base itself had served as the original center of the U.S. military mat-trans network, and its operations room was geared to monitoring its use. A vast Mercator relief map stretched across one wall above the double doors, covered in lights and lines that indicated the pathways and usage flow of the mat-trans system in the manner of a flight path map.

Two aisles of computers dominated the room, each one dedicated to the monitoring of the mat-trans and the feed data from the satellites.

In the far corner of the huge ops room was an antechamber that housed a smaller cubicle, its walls finished in a toughened, smoky brown armaglass. This was the mat-trans gateway itself, fully operational and able to fling an individual's atoms across the quantum ether in a fraction of a second.

As Lakesh entered the ops room, he could tell that the mat-trans had been functioning very recently, could smell the smoke it had emitted that was now dissipating in the air around him and could hear the air conditioners working overtime to clear it. Along with a handful of other operatives, Donald Bry crowded around the
entrance to the mat-trans unit where two figures had emerged. Both figures were quite short, one no more than two feet tall. Like the other personnel in the redoubt, Donald was dressed in an all-in-one white jump suit with a blue, vertical zipper at its center. He had a mop of copper-colored curls, and his face showed its usual expression of consternation, switching to momentary relief when he saw Lakesh stride across the room toward him.

“Who do we have here, Donald?” Lakesh asked, his firm voice carrying loudly across the hushed room.

While two armed guards held the newcomer in their sights, Donald stepped aside and Lakesh saw the familiar face clearly for the first time. It was Balam of the First Folk, and he was accompanied by a human child with white-blond hair whom Lakesh assumed immediately to be Quavell's daughter. Ordering the guards to stand down, Lakesh approached the curious-looking pair.

“Welcome to our home, Balam,” Lakesh said, stretching his hand out to greet the familiar alien.

Balam nodded his bulbous, pink-gray head once in acknowledgment. “Salutations, Dr. Singh. It's been a long time.”

“Indeed it has,” Lakesh agreed as he brushed his hand over Little Quav's hair, making her giggle with glee.

“I am afraid,” Balam began with gravity, “that the nature of my visit is not a social one.”

Kane's field team returned to Cerberus in the early afternoon, using their Manta craft to travel cross-country and back to the hidden mountain base. They carried with them a small clutch of the strange mollusks that they had found washed up along the Hope beachfront. They had found a half dozen in all, each a different size but with the basic sluglike body inside a whirling, oily-rainbow-colored shell. Each one was dead when they found it, but neither Kane, Brigid nor Grant could locate any live examples in their brief jaunt along the coast. All three had tried digging into the sand in a few spots, both wet and dry, in case the unusual mollusks were burying themselves, but they failed to find any further examples. It seemed that the creatures really were just washing in on the tide, a whole host of dead animals from who knew where.

Travel by Manta was swift and almost silent as the slope-winged vehicles powered through the skies. The Mantas were propelled by two different types of engine—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation air spikes—allowing them to operate both in atmosphere and beyond it as subspace vehicles.

When Kane, Grant and Brigid arrived back at the Cerberus hangar bay, they were instructed to meet with Lakesh immediately in one of the secure interrogation rooms located in the subbasement.

“Do we have time to wash up?” Kane asked.

“And maybe get a consult on these?” Brigid added, brandishing a small clear plastic pouch full of the recovered shellfish.

The guard on duty shrugged, urging them to meet with Lakesh immediately. “Those were my orders, guys,” he explained. “Lakesh seemed pretty serious about it.”

Grant shot Kane a look as the trio exited the hangar area and headed to the internal stairwell. “‘Serious' doesn't sound good,” he muttered.

Kane offered a lopsided grin to his partner as he brushed dark hair from his face. “Maybe he's throwing us a surprise party,” he proposed.

“You don't believe that, do you?” Grant questioned, chuckling a little despite himself.

In response, Kane held up his hands innocently as he started to make his way down the echoing staircase.

Taking the bag from Brigid, Grant told them he would go find their resident oceanographer while the pair of them placated Lakesh. “I'd sooner get these checked out as quickly as possible,” he explained.

At the bottom of the stairs, the subbasement featured one long corridor painted a dull shade of off-white, with stairwells at both ends and a goods elevator located centrally along one wall. The corridor stretched almost the complete length of the Cerberus redoubt, a vast distance in all, and there were numerous rooms located to the left and right, among them a firing range, vast storage lockers and several interrogation and incarceration rooms. At the far end of the corridor, a set of double doors led into the recycling area, where food and other trash were deposited so that the facility could remain fully self-sufficient in case of an extended siege.

Kane pulled open the heavy fire door at the base of the stairs and led the way down the corridor, still light on his feet despite the extended period he had spent cooped up in the cockpit of the Manta. Brigid followed, gazing left and right in an effort to locate the room where Lakesh was working. Roughly one-third of the way down the long corridor, two armed guards stood to attention as they saw two members of the fabled Cerberus field crew enter.

“Dr. Singh has requested—” one of them began when he saw Kane and Brigid, but Kane brushed the remark away.

“We've heard this tune already, second verse same as the first,” Kane assured him. “Just tell us which door.”

The guard led the way to an interrogation room located close to the goods lift on the left-hand wall. “In there,” he explained.

There was a wide pane of reinforced one-way glass along the wall, and Kane peered through it, looking at the occupants of the bland, simple room. There was a standard table, bolted to the floor as a security measure, along with a smattering of chairs, some of them stacked at the side of the room farthest from the table. A large cork notice board occupied one wall, with a similar, smaller board decorating the wall opposite the one-way glass.

Inside, Kane could see Lakesh and Donald Bry sitting on one side of the desk, addressing questions to their visitor. A little way across the room, much to Kane's surprise, Cerberus physician Reba DeFore was jiggling a little girl on her knee as she proceeded to give her a health checkup. The girl had feathery white-blond hair tied back in a ponytail, and wide, expressive blue eyes.
As Kane watched, DeFore, whose ash-blond hair had been tied up in an elaborate braid that left corkscrew-like strands dangling beside her ears, tickled the little girl's tummy to make her laugh before peering into her mouth with the tiny light of her handheld otoscope.

Kane turned his attention back to the weird humanoid figure that sat at the far side of the desk with Lakesh and Donald, recognizing it instantly. “Looks like Balam's come to pay us a visit,” he growled as his beautiful colleague joined him.

“And is that Little Quav?” Brigid asked, tapping at the glass to indicate the blond-haired child who sat on Reba's lap. Brigid was clearly delighted to see the girl. “She's grown so.”

Kane reached for the door, turning the handle. “Why don't we go say hello?”

With that, the tall ex-Mag pushed open the door and made his way inside, like a jungle cat stalking warily into a cage.

“Balam, pal o' mine,” Kane spit through clenched teeth, his eyes focused on the weird, alien form at the desk, “it's been a long time.”

“Not too long I hope, Kane,” Balam chirped, his doleful eyes gazing at the new entrants as they filed into the room.

“It could never be too long,” Kane growled sarcastically.

Lakesh and Donald turned from the desk, and Lakesh gave Kane a warning look. “Now, Kane, let's show some hospitality toward our honored visitors.”

“Hospitality,” Kane repeated, speaking the word as if it were something jagged that had just cut his tongue. “Right.”

Feeling the tension in the room, Brigid stepped
forward and diffused it with her bright, sincere smile. “How have you been, Balam? How's Little Quav?”

“I have been keeping myself to myself,” the gray-skinned alien replied simply in his softly spoken manner. “Quav seems to have settled into life in Agartha well. We have found some places where she may delight in play.”

Brigid laughed when she heard that, turning her attention from the strange, alienlike humanoid at the far end of the room to the playful child on Reba's lap. “Listen to you, you old softie,” Brigid said. “I never pictured you for the doting parent type.” This was not entirely true, of course, for Brigid knew that Balam had at least two sons who had been raised in the underground city of Agartha. Still, it did genuinely amuse her to hear Balam speak with such a gentle tone of real emotion.

“Children change us,” Balam admitted, his sinewy, six-fingered hands weaving through the air in a nervous tic. “They have the ability to show our true faces, no matter how we try to hide them.”

Resting against the wall, Kane remained tense. His steely gaze had not left Balam since he had entered the room. “So, what?” he challenged. “This a social visit?”

Balam shook his huge, bulbous head ever so slightly, and his lips mouthed the word
no
so quietly that Kane wasn't sure that the visitor had actually spoken at all. “It saddens me to have to come to you at this time, but I have been made aware of a situation that requires urgent attention.”

Brigid Baptiste pulled up a free chair to join Balam at the desk, while Kane took several steps closer until
he loomed over them all, his shadow dark on the alien's domelike pate.

“What sort of a situation?” Brigid probed gently.

Balam raised his head slightly, and Brigid could not be sure if his fathomless eyes were staring at her or through her. “Many millennia ago, the Annunaki established a store that would house all of their knowledge,” he explained. “This storehouse was called the Ontic Library, for it contained all of the caveats that defined the real from the imagined or the spiritually malleable.”

Brigid nodded, aware of the philosophical resonance of the term
ontic.

“Over the past few days I have felt things in my head,” Balam continued, clearly referring to his telepathic nature, “that make me suspect that the library has been breached and may, in fact, be being broken apart.”

Kane shrugged, clearly unimpressed. “So it's a library,” he said. “Big deal.”

Balam turned to face Kane, staring at him with those strangely expressive black eyes, but he took a long, calming breath before he actually spoke. “This is not a library as you understand the term,” he explained. “This is a storehouse for the very rules governing this reality. Should it be broken apart, destroyed, there is a significant risk that ‘the real'—that is, your world—will cease to hold integrity.”

“So, the world is under threat?” Kane asked, incredulous.

“More,” Balam stated, “the very rules that underpin the world are threatened. The Ontic Library is a store of knowledge so powerful that it holds the structure of
‘the real' in place. Without it, your world, your universe may very well cease to hold together.”

Kane looked uncomfortable at the thought, and his brow furrowed with irritation. “Why would they do that? Why create something that could destroy everything around you?”

“Is your knowledge of human history so poor?” Balam challenged in his soft-spoken manner. “Or have you conveniently forgotten the bloodshed caused by humankind barely two centuries ago at the push of a single button?”

“But a library,” Kane said, still trying to comprehend the concept. “Why would they—?”

“The Annunaki are multidimensional beings, Kane,” Balam stated. “Do you concern yourself that food may spoil in your larder, or that a pot might overboil while inside your oven? Everything has a risk, even the retention of knowledge.”

Kane nodded, still feeling uncomfortable at the notion he had just been presented with.

Sitting at the desk, Brigid leaned forward to regain Balam's attention. “So, where is this Ontic Library located?”

“Beneath the ocean you call the Pacific,” Balam stated emotionlessly, “off the coast of the barony of Snakefishville.”

“Hope,” Brigid breathed, a horrible realization knotting the pit of her stomach.

“Had to fucking be,” Kane growled, clearly irritated that he hadn't realized it before now.

 

B
ACK IN THE FISHING VILLE
of Hope, a separate Cerberus field team agents had been operating out of the shantytown area that surrounded the main ville. Like
Kane's group, this team was also a three-person operation, but they had journeyed to the overwhelmed ville using an interphaser unit and had traveled the remaining distance on foot, carrying much-needed medical supplies to the area. Right now, the three operatives were handing out antibiotics to a youthful family that was suffering a bout of skin rashes due to the poor sanitation of the area.

Domi looked at the eldest of the six children in the covered shack where her team had set up base. The child was a dark-haired boy of perhaps four years old, and Domi recognized the fear in the child's eyes. He was afraid of her because she looked different, Domi knew, but she wasn't here to make friends. Instead, she ignored him, turning her attention to the busy dirt street that ran between the slanting temporary dwellings while her colleagues, Edwards and Johnson, doled out the relevant medical supplies.

Domi was a small-framed woman, standing barely five feet tall, with the slender build of an adolescent girl. Her skin was a vivid white the color of chalk, and was complemented by similarly colored hair, cut short in a pixie style. She wore a simple outfit that left much of her unusual skin on display, cutoff denim shorts that sat low to her belly and finished high on the hip, and an abbreviated crop top in a dull tan color that clung tightly to her small, pert breasts. Contrary to her usual style, she had elected to wear shoes while round the refugee camp, a pair of muddy pumps with a gripping, cushioned sole; she would prefer to go barefoot given the choice.

Domi was a child of the Outlands, having grown up far from the protective walls of Cobaltville, where she had ended up prior to joining the Cerberus team. As
such, her outlook was quite different—and often less diplomatic—than that held by her colleagues. A fearsome six-inch knife was strapped to her ankle, and she wore a Detonics Combat Master handgun in a leather holster slung low on her bare, chalk-white hip. Overall, Domi looked like a human figure that had been carved from bone. But it was her fiercely darting eyes that added to the feeling of otherness in the people who saw her. In stark contrast to her pure white flesh, Domi's eyes were a deep scarlet color, like two glistening pools of blood.

Right now, Domi's bloodred eyes were scanning the street, watching the many figures trotting along it with their meager belongings, their buckets and bowls of water, moth-eaten blankets and clothes. Mangy dogs and flea-bitten cats stepped out of the way to avoid the humans as they went about their business, and the street itself stank of human waste. Domi wrinkled her nose at the stench, all the more repulsed for her senses were unusually perceptive. Where Edwards and Johnson had become used to the unpleasant reek of Hope, Domi remained disgusted and a little nauseous despite being there for over a day.

A group of people was making its way down the street, six in all. Dressed in rags like the others around them, they seemed somehow different to Domi, giving her the impression that they were much more organized. She watched them for a moment, realizing that despite their ragged appearances, they were walking in perfect time, like soldiers at a parade. Not soldiers, she realized—birds. They moved like flocks of birds on the wing, turning as one.