Distortion Offensive

Grant chuckled as he answered Tony’s question. “They’re real, all right,” he assured him. “Me and my buddies flew here in them.”

Tony turned to Grant, his eyes wider than ever. “You flew them? Are you some kind of spaceman or something?”

Grant placed a friendly hand on the teenager’s shoulder and guided him closer to the Mantas as the early-morning sun played off their metallic shells. “No, we’re just like you, kid,” he said.

Tony ran a hand along the wing of the nearest vehicle, touching the swirling patterns that had been engraved within its surface. “They’re beautiful,” he said.

He had come down from his high, Grant realized, just an excitable kid once more.

“Do you think you could ever fly one?” Grant asked.

Tony beamed. “I’d love to. How fast do they go?”

“Real fast,” Grant assured him. “You could cover the whole of this ville in five seconds.”

Tony was amazed. His was a world of poverty and survival; he had almost no inkling that such wondrous technology existed. While he looked at the engines at the back of the Manta craft, Grant brought up the subject of the mollusks and learned that the youth had found them on the beach while he was down there with his girlfriend. They were both hungry, it seemed, so they had decided to try eating them. They tasted lousy raw, so Tony had cooked them, starting a fire like his father had showed him. That kind of stood to reason, Grant thought, and he quietly admired the kid’s adventurousness.

A few minutes later, Grant and the fourteen-year-old entered the church hall to join the others as they, too, discussed the mysterious mollusks.

Inside, Kane and Brigid had separately established that Pam had cooked and eaten the strange mollusks with Tony.

“We found them along the beach, near the old pier,” she explained.

“Were they alive?” Brigid asked.

Pam shrugged. “I don’t think so. They didn’t try to get away or nothing.”

“So they probably washed up on the tide,” Kane concluded.

Vernor concurred. “I saw a few things like that lying on the beach when I walked Betsy the other day.” Betsy was his dog, an old mutt who spent most of her day sleeping in her basket passing gas.

“Recently?” Kane asked.

“Must have been—” Vernor thought back “—the day before yesterday. Didn’t really pay them much attention, and Betsy—well, she doesn’t let stuff like that worry her no more.” That was an understatement, Kane knew. Betsy didn’t let anything bother her anymore; she seemed to be content just counting the days until she finally croaked.

Kane turned his attention back to the teenager, running through a logical series of questions as his analytical Magistrate training had taught. “Were there a lot of them?” he asked. “How many?”

Pam thought for a few seconds, her eyes looking up as she tried to remember. “We ate…maybe fifteen. Some were dead small, though.”

“That’s all right,” Brigid assured her. “You haven’t done anything wrong. Just tell us.”

Pam nodded. “My mom will be getting worried. I should be at home.”

Kane’s eyes met with Grant where he had entered the hall with the other teen, and the huge ex-Mag nodded infinitesimally.

“You two head home, then,” Kane instructed the kids, “but I want you to report to Doc Price here if you get any stomach problems, okay? We’re not sure what’s in those things you ate, and I wouldn’t recommend that you eat them again.”

“Are we going to die?” Pam asked, her voice taking on a whining quality.

“No,” Brigid assured her, shaking her head firmly. “You just might have an upset tummy for a little while. You’ve both been rather silly eating these things. They could have been poisonous.”

Apologetically, the two teenagers gathered themselves up and, hand-in-hand, made their way through the shadowy porch and off down the street.

Brigid laughed as she watched them go. “Young love.”

Kane sighed, shaking his head in despair. “Let’s get back to the problem at hand, Baptiste,” he growled. “The flesh of these mollusks has some kind of psychotropic property when eaten.”

“That’s not that unusual,” Brigid told him. “It may not even be particularly dangerous.”

Kane offered a self-deprecating smile. “Trust me, Baptiste—it’s always dangerous. Whatever it is.”

Grant chuckled. “You’re getting to be a real cynic in your old age, Kane.”

“This area is overpopulated and hungry,” Kane stated. “If these things start washing up on shore in greater numbers, we may very well see a spate of drug-related problems arise as more and more people start hallucinating after eating them. We have a rare opportunity to nip this problem in the bud. So, I want to know what they are where they’re coming from.”

Grant and Brigid nodded. “Agreed.”

Church warden Vernor proposed to spread Kane’s warning to the local fishermen, and he went off to make a start with Betsy in tow.

“Sea creatures often swap shells,” Brigid pointed out, “but if we can catch a complete one we could take it back to Cerberus and show it to Clem.”

Kane looked mystified for a moment. “Clem?” he asked. “The cook?”

Brigid smiled. “Chef. And Clem Bryant is a brilliant oceanographer, dear,” she teased.

“He cooks a mean toasted sandwich,” Grant added. “I know that much.”

“Not helping,” Brigid chastised him.

Kane shrugged. “Okay, I’ll take your word for it. Let’s go take a look along the beach and see if we can find us a little something to show to Clem.”

“Heh. Maybe he’ll cook it for us.” Grant chuckled.

Brigid glared at him. “Still not helping.”

The trio made its way out of the church and down the steps, heading toward the beach with jocularity despite their concerns.

“So,” Kane asked, “how did Clem end up chefing for the tired, hungry masses of Cerberus?”

Brigid looked exasperated. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Kane gave her his most innocent look. “Well, I just assumed you knew everything, Baptiste.”

“You know what happens when you assume?” Brigid challenged.

“No, what?” Kane challenged back.

“I kick you in the nuts, smart guy.”

“Yeah, that sounds familiar,” Kane agreed.

AT THE CERBERUS REDOUBT located high in the Bitterroot Mountains in Montana, adventuring geologist Mariah Falk sat alone at her private desk in the laboratory, watching as the results of a spectrographic test appeared on her computer screen. Beside the desk, a single crutch rested, propped up against its side. Mariah had been testing the same batch of rocks ever since she had got back from the escapade in Canada that had seen her, along with Brigid Baptiste and another Cerberus man called Edwards, caught up in a deadly ordeal that sucked the very will from the Cerberus teammates. During that ordeal, Mariah had almost killed herself in supplication to the stone being known as Ullikummis.

Mariah was a slender woman in her forties, her dark hair cut short and showing traces of white throughout. Though not conventionally pretty, Mariah had an ingratiating smile and a fiercely inquisitive nature that made her a fascinating and engaging companion. She had recently been spending more of her time in the company of Cerberus oceanographer-turned-chef Clem Bryant, and their attraction to each other was clearly mutual. Both Mariah and Clem hailed from the last days of the twentieth century, where they had been part of a military program that saw them cryogenically frozen until the nuclear hostilities were concluded.

Mariah grimaced as she checked the spectrographic results for a second time. Despite every incredible thing she had seen in Canada just three days before, there was nothing on these charts to indicate that there was anything out of the ordinary about the rocks she had brought back. Frustrated, Mariah sighed and wondered at what else she could do.

As she sat there thinking, Lakesh stepped through the doorway and greeted her. The nominal head of the Cerberus organization, he was a tall man who appeared to be in his midfifties, with refined features and an aquiline nose. Known to his friends as Lakesh, Dr. Mohandas Lakesh Singh was in fact a 250-year-old man who had been involved with the Cerberus redoubt back before the nuclear conflict had all but destroyed civilization. Though ancient, Lakesh had had a degree of his youth restored by Enlil in his guise of Sam the Imperator. Over recent months, Lakesh had begun to suspect that that blessing had in fact been a curse, for he was worried that he would begin to age once more, and at a far more rapid pace than was normal.

The slim doctor made his way over to where Mariah sat and lowered himself so that he was at the same eye level as her. “How are things going here, Mariah?”

Mariah sighed once more and showed him the results of her analysis. “Not good,” she admitted. “There’s nothing untoward about the rocks I brought back with me.”

Lakesh offered a friendly smile. “This must be a new definition of the term ‘not good.’ Would you care to explain?”

“The asteroid that we believe held Ullikummis is nothing more than metamorphic rock. Its original source was probably igneous and originated right here on Earth,” Mariah explained. “Both spectral and carbon analysis place the rock at over six thousand years old, but it’s difficult to be more specific without an idea of where it came from. This rock type is so common it would be impossible to be that specific,” Mariah added.

“An educated guess…” Lakesh encouraged.

Mariah shrugged. “A tropical climate, possibly Africa or the Middle East. I honestly don’t know. There are also traces of radiation, but it’s at a very low level and that’s as likely from its travel through space.”

“I see,” Lakesh mused. “And the other material?”

Mariah picked up a slate-gray chunk of rock. “It’s just schist,” she explained. “You’ll find it all over Canada. It’s a good building material, but it has no special properties whatsoever.”

“You sound disappointed,” Lakesh observed as he lifted himself up and gave Mariah’s results the once-over.

“I saw this stuff move,” Mariah reminded him, “like it was alive. That monster—Ullikummis—built a wall with it, and not with his hands. A rock wall grew out of the soil, and it then proceeded to follow his commands, moving as he willed it. It was alive, I’d swear it.”

“It was granted life,” Lakesh corrected pensively. “Instructed to act as it did.”

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, “bringing 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.”

THE CERBERUS 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.”

Chapter 5

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.”