Distortion Offensive

Chapter 3

The Cerberus trio had spent the night in the spare rooms of the church warden, an aging man whose name was Vernor, but they awoke early and made their way out to the beach at Brigid’s insistence.

“We spend half our lives cooped up inside a mountain,” Brigid had insisted, referring to the hidden Cerberus redoubt in Montana where the team was based, “and the other half fighting for our lives. Let’s go take a look at the ocean and remind ourselves what it is we’re fighting for.”

Grant agreed and, albeit with a reluctant grunt, Kane ultimately agreed, too. He’d much sooner spend another hour in bed, catching up on some much-needed rest, but he knew there was no reasoning with the red-haired archivist when she got like this.

When the three of them reached the beachfront, Brigid rushed off toward the rolling waves while Grant hung back to talk with Kane.

“Everything okay?” Grant asked, his voice a low rumble like distant thunder.

“What, with me?” Kane replied. “Sure. Why do you ask?”

“You just seem—” Grant shrugged “—I dunno, like you’d sooner be somewhere else.”

Kane looked at Grant, fixing his trusty partner in his steely stare. “No, this is… Well, it’s nice,” Kane said, sweeping his hands before him to take in the vista of the sandy beach and the churning turquoise waves of the Pacific as a quintet of seagulls swooped across its surface, squawking to one another. “Just makes a weird change from the usual.”

“Beating the crap out of Annunaki stone gods and their screwed-up minions, you mean?” Grant asked lightly, the humor clear from his tone.

Kane laughed. “Yeah, something like that.” With that, he and Grant joined Brigid at the ocean’s edge, where she had removed her boots to wade in the spume-dappled water.

Though meant in jest, Kane knew that Grant’s statement had an air of truth to it. Just ten days before, Kane and Grant had found themselves battling with a stone-like being called Ullikummis, who had returned from the stars after almost five thousand years in exile from his Annunaki brethren. The Annunaki had been a constant thorn in the side of the Cerberus warriors since their earliest days as a team. Once mistaken for space gods, the Annunaki were lizardlike, alien visitors who assumed different aspects in their ultimate quest to subjugate and subvert humankind, denying it from reaching its full potential. Primary among those so-called gods was the ruthless Enlil, whose subtle planning and mastery of deception made him a formidable foe.

Ullikummis was, in fact, Enlil’s son, his lizardlike body genetically altered to serve a specific purpose—to be his father’s personal assassin. But approximately five thousand years ago, something had gone wrong in Ullikummis’s assassination attempt on a god called Teshub, and Enlil had disowned his scion, exiling him to space, imprisoned within an asteroid.

Less than a month ago, Ullikummis reappeared when his rock prison crash-landed in the Canadian heartland, and the stone-clad Annunaki prince had soon indoctrinated a small group of loyal followers from the local populace. Three Cerberus operatives had been among those would-be followers, including Brigid Baptiste herself, who had found the stone lord’s Svengali-like instruction almost impossible to resist. Accompanied by their colleague Domi, Kane and Grant had led an assault on Ullikummis’s stone base, freeing Brigid and the others and destroying the eerie headquarters that Ullikummis had created from the rocks and named Tenth City. Ullikummis himself had been pushed into a superhot oven by Kane, where his rock body had been blasted with jets of fire until it was reduced to ash.

“Come on, guys,” Brigid called, her cheery voice intruding on Kane’s somber thoughts.

Kane looked up and saw Brigid wading in the shallow waves of the ocean, her pant legs rolled up to just below her knees.

“It’s lovely and cool,” Brigid told them.

Grant had located a large, flat rock, which he used as a seat while he removed his own boots and carefully folded his trench coat. “My feet have been in boots so long I think they’re getting engaged,” Grant rumbled as he wiggled his dark-skinned toes.

Kane snorted at his partner’s remark, wondering for a moment how long it had been since he had last been dressed for anything other than action. His gaze swept out across the rolling ocean, watching the early-morning sunlight play on its ever-changing surface as it rushed to meet with the shore. Even this early, Kane could see several small fishing boats making their way out into open ocean. Then he turned, taking in the beach and the little fishing ville that had been built along its edge, the clutch of little two-and three-story buildings that sat as a solid reminder of man’s tenacity to survive. Down there, a little way along the beach, a few struts of rotting wood marked where the fishing pier had once stood, jutting into the ocean. Kane had been on that pier when it had collapsed, battling with a beautiful, sword-wielding dancing girl called Rosalia. As Kane smiled, recalling the antagonistic nature of the dancing girl, his eyes focused on two figures crouching in the shadows of the broken pier. Definitely human, neither figure was moving.

While Grant and Brigid kicked at the water with their bare feet, Kane padded silently across the sand, taking to a light jog as he made his way toward the pier and the figures underneath. Kane noticed the remnants of a little camp fire as he approached the pier, a clutch of broken shells—two dozen in all—littered all around it. He could see now that the figures at the pier were quite young, still teenagers, a boy and a girl.

“You okay?” Kane called as he slowed his pace to a trot.

Neither teen acknowledged him; neither even looked up at the sound of his voice. They were sitting on the sand, very still, the girl’s legs stretched before her while the boy had pulled his knees up and had his arms wrapped around them as though to stave off the cold.

“Hey?” Kane tried again. “You guys need some help?”

An alarm was going off in the back of Kane’s mind, an old instinct from his days as a Magistrate, recognizing danger before he had consciously acknowledged it. There was something wrong with the teenagers, something eerie and out of place. They were just sitting there unmoving, like statues.

When he reached the wrecked underside of the pier, Kane crouched beneath the low-hanging crossbeams and made his way to the two figures waiting there. They were too still, and Kane unconsciously checked for the weight of the Sin Eater handgun that was strapped to his right arm, its wrist holster hidden beneath the sleeve of his denim jacket.

“You kids all right?” Kane prompted again, slowing and looking around the shadow-thick area of the pier as he warily approached the young couple.

The girl had dirty-blond hair that almost matched the wet sand of the beach, and she was dressed in a T-shirt and cutoffs that showed off her girlish figure. The boy had dyed his short hair the color of plum, and wore a ring through one nostril that glinted in the early-morning sunlight over the fluffy beginnings of an adolescent’s beard. Like the girl, he was dressed in cutoffs, though his shirt was long-sleeved where hers stopped just past her bony shoulders.

For a moment Kane took them to be dead, but then he saw the slight rise and fall of the girl’s chest. She was still breathing at least, and Kane scrambled over to her, grasping her by her shoulders and shaking her.

“Wake up,” Kane urged. “Come on, now.” In his days as a Cobaltville Magistrate, Kane had seen people in various states of semiconsciousness and delirium, and he knew the first thing he had to do was try to rouse the suspect. He slapped lightly at the boy’s face to try to pull him out of whatever trance he had fallen into. “Hey, hey—snap out of it.”

Brigid and Grant had left the sea and traipsed over the beach to join Kane at the little shelter beneath the ruined pier.

“What’s going on?” Grant asked as he ducked his huge frame to peer beneath the wooden crossbeams.

Kane glanced up at his colleagues, seeing that Grant wore his coat and boots once more, while Brigid Baptiste remained barefoot, carrying her own boots in one hand by their wide openings.

“I thought they were dead, but they’re not,” Kane explained briefly. “But I can’t seem to wake them up.”

Brigid made her way beneath the jagged crossbeams and knelt beside Kane, while Grant stood at the opening.

“I’ll go back into town and see if I can get some medical help,” Grant announced. “Stay in touch,” he added, tapping the side of his face with his finger before turning to make his way up the beach. He meant by Commtact, and didn’t need to spell that fact out to his colleagues.

“What’s happened to them?” Brigid asked as she shook the girl gently, trying to rouse her while Kane focused his attention on the boy.

“No idea,” Kane admitted. “Flesh is cold so I’d guess they’ve been out here all night, but this is more than simply the effects of exposure.”

“I concur,” Brigid agreed as the blond-haired girl finally started to groan as if waking from a deep slumber.

“Wh—” the girl groaned. “What is…it?”

“It’s okay,” Brigid told her in a sympathetic voice. “You’re okay, you’re safe.”

The teen boy was waking up, too, and Kane reassured him in a sharp, professional tone as he held his head steady and stared into his eyes. The pupils were normal and reactive, and there was no trace of blood in the whites.

“What happened to you guys?” Kane asked, turning his attention from one to the other.

The girl was staring at Brigid, her eyes wide. Slowly, she reached up and grabbed a lock of Brigid’s vibrant hair. “It’s so colorful,” she muttered. “Does it hurt?”

“My hair?” Brigid asked, perplexed. “No, it doesn’t hurt. It’s hair, just like yours.”

The girl shook her head, smiling with disbelief. “There are things in your hair,” she said, “hidden in the angles. They live in the shadows, making the tangles their home. The tangles of your hair turn back on themselves, creating non-space, like a tesseract. That’s where the things live. That’s where you hide your memories.”

Brigid looked at the young woman, a disconcerting sense of fear gripping her. At first she had thought that the girl had seen lice there, but that wasn’t what she was describing at all. A tesseract was a dimensional anomaly, a place that appeared bigger on the inside than it did from without. An advanced mathematical concept, a tesseract was something that a girl of that age wouldn’t normally be speaking of, Brigid reasoned. And yet, the way she had used the term, it was as though she could see it as she looked into Brigid’s glossy mane of sunset-colored hair. To see the impossible.

“My name’s Brigid,” the woman offered, trying to remain calm despite the strange turn in the conversation. “What’s yours?”

The teenager looked at Brigid, her blue eyes fixed on the older woman’s curls as she ran them through her fingers once more. “Pam,” she said. “I’m Pam. Your hair hides lots of secrets, Brigid. I wish mine could do that.”

Beside Pam, the other teen had started muttering, too, and Kane helped him to his feet and led him out of the dark shelter of the pier with Brigid bringing the girl along shortly after. “Watch your head,” Kane instructed as he ducked into the sunlight. “Let’s walk it off together, okay?”

Kane walked the youth in a little circuit across the beach, instructing him to take deep breaths and get himself together. As they walked, Kane’s Commtact came to life and Grant advised that he had found the local doctor and would be along shortly.

A couple of minutes later, having quizzed the teenagers some more and assured themselves that the two were all right—physically, at least—Kane took Brigid to one side and asked what she made of them.

“They’re whacked out on something,” Brigid concluded. “The girl’s seeing visions wherever she looks. She told me the sea was being dragged to and fro by the moon.”

Kane grimaced. “That’s kind of true, I guess. You know, with tides and so on.”

To Brigid, it sounded as if Kane was trying to convince himself. “Teenage girls don’t say things like that, Kane,” she told him. “She was talking about a tesseract being hidden within the angles of my hair. A place where I kept my memories.”

“They’ve been smoking something, all right,” Kane growled, looking around the campfire for evidence of cigarette butts or drug-taking equipment. There was nothing there; all he could see were the shells of smoke-damaged shellfish, cracked and empty.

“Or perhaps eating it,” Brigid realized as she crouched by the empty mollusk shells to put her boots back on. “I think they had a little snack out here, Kane—look.”

Kane cocked an eyebrow as he picked up and examined one of the empty shells between thumb and forefinger. “Breakfast?” he suggested.

“More likely a midnight snack,” Brigid told him, gathering up several shells and peering at them. They were different sizes, and each had been burned so that they were streaked with black, but they appeared to be of the same creature type.

“What are they?” Kane asked.

Brigid peered at them for a long moment, turning them on the palm of her hand, her brow furrowed.

“Baptiste?” Kane urged when she didn’t respond.

“I don’t know,” Brigid admitted, mystified. In another person, this admission may have seemed innocent, but Kane knew that Brigid Baptiste had a phenomenal knowledge base, augmented by a rare natural quirk known as an eidetic memory, which meant she could visually reproduce in her mind’s eye anything that she had ever seen. And as an ex-archivist and natural scholar, Brigid Baptiste had seen quite a lot. In many ways, she seemed more like a walking encyclopedia than a person when challenged to produce theories.

When Brigid looked up, she saw Kane’s puzzled expression.

“No ideas?” he asked.

“It’s from the same genetic strain as mollusks and crustaceans,” Brigid assured him, “but I can’t place the type. Not off the top of my head, anyway.”

“And that’s a lot of head,” Kane mumbled.

As they spoke, Grant returned, accompanied by the church warden and a local medical practitioner called Mallory Price. Price was a tall, gangly woman with a gaunt face and thin blond hair, and she looked very much as if she had just been woken up.

“What do we have?” Mallory asked as she approached the two teenagers, glancing over at Kane and Brigid. Her voice was husky, as if she had spent a lifetime shouting or smoking. Kane couldn’t tell which.

“I found them in a trancelike state under the pier,” Kane explained as he joined the medical woman. “They just didn’t seem to want to wake up.”

“The girl said some stuff,” Brigid added as she walked over to join them, her boots back on her feet once more. “Unusual things, not what you’d expect from a teen.”

Price checked the two teenagers briefly, but other than their general disorientation, she could find nothing ostensibly wrong with them. “They’re both suffering a little bit from exposure,” she told Kane and the others, “but they’re young. They’ll be fine.”

“What about their altered state of mind when he found them?” Kane asked.

The woman shrugged. “Teenagers being teenagers,” she said. “Who knows what they’re getting hooped up on. You probably did the same when you were their age.”

Overhearing this, Grant laughed. “Oh, you don’t know Kane,” he muttered.

Kane opened his fist and showed the mollusk shell to Mallory. “Have you seen one of these before, Doc?” he asked, letting her handle the little shell.

The medical woman turned it over in her hands. “What is that?” she queried. “Some kind of snail?”

The church warden, an older man called Vernor, with thinning hair that was turning gray at the temples, had made his way over by then, and he sucked at his teeth as he peered at the shell in Mallory’s hands. “Could be a crab, maybe?” he suggested.

“Could be a lot of things, Vern,” Kane agreed.

The old church warden looked up at Kane with an expression of concern. “Seen a few of these things wash up just lately. You think this has something to do with how these kids are acting, Kane?”

“Let’s get these kids inside and see whether we can make any sense out of all of this,” Kane suggested noncommittally.

“I KNOW.”

The words came as a whisper from the thin gray lips of a creature called Balam. He was fifteen hundred years old and he had been born as the last of the Archons, a race that confirmed a pact between the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan millennia before.

He was a small figure, humanoid in appearance but with long, thin arms and a wide, bulbous head that narrowed to a pointed chin. Entirely hairless, Balam’s skin was a pink so washed out as to appear gray. Within his strangely expressive face, Balam had two wide, upslanting eyes, as black as bottomless pools, their edges tapering to points. His tiny mouth resided below two small, flat nostrils that served as his nose.

He reached out before him, spreading the six fingers of each hand as if to stave off something that was attacking, and a gasp of breath came from his open mouth.

There was a child playing in the underground garden that spread before him. She was human in appearance and perhaps three years old, wearing a one-piece suit in a dark indigo blue that seemed to match the simple garment that Balam himself wore. The child turned at Balam’s words, her pretty, snow-blond hair swishing behind her in simple ponytail, her large, blue eyes wide with curiosity.

“Wha’ is it?” the child asked, peering up from the daisy chain she had been making on the little expanse of lawn before Balam’s dwelling.

Balam looked at the child with those strange, fathomless eyes and wondered if she might recognize the fear on his face, the fear that had threatened for just a moment to overwhelm him.

The child smiled at him, chuckling a little in that strange, deep way that human children will. “Uncle Bal-bal?” she asked. “Wha’ is it?”

“The Ontic Library has been breached,” Balam said, his words heavy with meaning, fully aware that the child could never comprehend the gravity of them. “Pack some toys, Quav. We’re going to visit some old friends.”

With that, Balam ushered the child—known as Little Quav after her late mother—back into their dwelling in the underground city of Agartha and prepared her for the interphase trip that would take them halfway around the world. It had been almost three years since Balam had last spoken with the Cerberus rebels, but the time had come to do so once again.

Chapter 4

The Cerberus warriors made their way back to the church hall, along with Vernor and the two teenagers, while Mallory returned to her surgery. The kid with the dyed hair—Tony—was getting edgy, and he started to ask some awkward questions. He’d been in trouble before, Kane realized, recognizing the signs, and he wondered if the youth might bolt before they could question him more fully about his altered state of mind.

Noticing the teen’s discomfort, Grant took the lead. “Hey, Tony,” he said, “you want to see something cool?”

Tony looked at the towering ex-Mag, visibly swallowing. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

“I know you didn’t,” Grant said reassuringly as they approached the stone steps that led into the church building. “Come on, we’ll catch up with these guys in a minute.” With that, Grant led the way off to the side of the two-story building with Tony tentatively following.

By contrast, the girl—Pam—seemed to have automatically slid into an air of unquestioning trust of the adults who were trying to help her. Kane reasoned that she had most likely grown up in a walled barony and was thereby indoctrinated to trust Magistrates and similar authority figures. Once again, Kane was struck by the difference between ville folk and outlanders.

Walking ahead, Grant didn’t bother to look back to check on his charge, thereby demonstrating his trust in the teen boy. They walked around the side of the church building, along a wide service road that led to a side gate that opened on an open-air storage area. Grant pointed to the gate. “Take a look inside,” he encouraged. “It won’t bite.”

Warily the plum-haired teenager worked the catch of the wooden gate, keeping one eye on Grant as the towering ex-Mag watched. “What’s in there?” he asked.

“Take a look, son,” Grant said, a smile on his lips.

Grant recognized the anticipation on Tony’s face, both excited and fearful, wondering if a trick was being played on him. When the boy didn’t open the gate, Grant reached over and pushed it gently until it swung open on a creaking hinge.

“Whoa!” Tony uttered, unable to contain his excitement. “Is that real? What are they?”

Two bronze-hued aircraft waited in the rough scrubland of the church hall garden. They were huge vehicles, with a wingspan of twenty yards, and a body length of almost fifteen feet. The beauty of their design was breathtaking, an effortless combination of every principle of aerodynamics wrapped up in a gleaming burned-gold finish. They had the shape and general configuration of seagoing manta rays, flattened wedges with graceful wings curving out from their bodies, and an elongated hump in the center of the craft providing the only evidence of a cockpit. Finished in a copper, metallic hue, the surfaces of each craft were decorated with curious geometric designs, elaborate cuneiform markings, swirling glyphs and cup-and-spiral symbols that covered the entire body of the aircraft. These were the Mantas, transatmospheric craft used by the Cerberus team for long-range missions. They were alien craft, discovered by Grant and Kane during one of their exploratory missions to the Manitius Moon base. While the adaptable vehicles were mostly used for long-haul and stealth missions, Kane, Grant and Brigid had employed them on this occasion as robust workhorses, able to convey the heavy crates of rations in collapsible storage units that had been attached to their undercarriages for transportation to Hope.