Distortion Offensive Read online

  Kane and Grant nodded in unison before making their way from the observation room and down the corridor toward the nearest stairwell. Once they had gone and Brigid was off in the interrogation room, Lakesh let out a long, strained sigh.

  “Is everything okay, Dr. Singh?” Donald Bry asked, and physician Reba DeFore also gave the aging cyberneticist a significant look.

  “Just tired,” Lakesh explained as he thanked them both for their concern. Then he excused himself and made his way to the nearest washroom just a little way down the bland, subbasement corridor.

  GRANT ACCOMPANIED KANE up the stairwell and they made their way to Clem Bryant’s quarters. “Sounds like some serious shit is going down,” he growled.

  “That about sums it up,” Kane agreed. “You didn’t miss anything.”

  Grant sighed wearily, shaking his head in despair as he followed Kane out of the gray-walled stairwell. “You ever miss the days when you could just shoot stuff until it keeled over?”

  Kane looked back at his partner and offered a sly smile. “I don’t remember.”

  Outside the stairwell, the redoubt corridor was painted an austere shade of charcoal with unsympathetically fierce lighting that did little to take off its edge. Clem Bryant’s private quarters were located midway down the corridor, and the two ex-Mags could detect the soft strains of music coming from behind the closed door as they approached. Gently but firmly, Kane rapped on the door until Clem’s clear voice replied, bidding them to enter.

  Within, they found a small, boxlike room, where the tall figure of Clem Bryant was pacing up and down, a large hardback book resting open in his hand. A single military cot was pushed against one wall, and Mariah Falk was sitting on the cot examining the strange shells in the light of a desk lamp that rested on the cabinet by the bed, her crutch leaning against the wall there. Above the bed itself, a cramped-to-overflowing shelf of books threatened to spill over, and orchestral music emanated from twin speakers lodged among the books. The music was up-tempo, with a certain level of pomposity to its resonance.

  Clem glanced up in acknowledgment when Kane and Grant entered before turning the page of the book he held. “Can I help you, gentlemen?” he asked.

  “It seems we’ve got a lead on our pond life,” Grant began, making his way into the room.

  Clem peered over the top of his book, his eyebrows raised in surprise. “That was certainly quick. You only brought them to me an hour ago.” He sounded amazed.

  “We’re thinking they may be related to something a little more esoteric than we first thought,” Kane explained, “and it just so happens we have an expert in the esoteric on-site.”

  Grant gathered up the half-dozen samples in their plastic bag. “We’re hoping he can identify these for us,” he said.

  Clem nodded. “Do you need me to come along to offer my input?”

  “Wouldn’t object,” Grant told him, and he led the way back to the corridor with Clem at his heels, explaining enthusiastically what little he had discovered.

  “Even no discovery is a discovery,” Clem chirruped.

  Grant scowled at the bookish oceanographer. “You were clearly never a Magistrate.”

  “Establishing what we don’t know is a vital step in confirming what it is that we do,” Clem admonished as he followed Grant down the stairwell.

  Back in Clem’s quarters, Kane waited a moment to talk with Mariah Falk. He had been part of the operation in Canada that had seen her get shot, and he felt a strange, dislocated sense of guilt at seeing her using a crutch to walk on her shattered ankle.

  “How are you doing, Mariah?” Kane asked. The authority had gone from his voice, replaced instead by kindness.

  “I’ve been better,” Mariah said, clearly uncomfortable in Kane’s presence.

  “Domi had to do it, you know,” Kane told the geologist. “She didn’t want to. I’ve taken a few wounds in my time. I know what it feels like and it’s not good.”

  Mariah blurted a single laugh at that as she reached across for the crutch she was now using to help her walk. “‘Not good’ is an understatement. It hurts like…heaven knows. Makes it all the worse when I think how Edwards came out of it without a scratch.”

  “Yeah, well, luck can be an insensitive bitch sometimes,” Kane grumbled. With that, Kane made his way to the door, glancing back at Mariah as she rose slowly from the bed. “You work on a painkiller addiction for me, okay?”

  Finally relaxed, Mariah giggled, her blue eyes twinkling bright. “I’ll do that, Kane. But only because you asked so nicely.”

  BRIGID SAT WITH BALAM in the interrogation room, a smile forming on her full lips as she watched Little Quav bounce the inflated rubber glove against her doll’s head and laugh in delight.

  “She seems happy,” Brigid stated, taking in Balam’s own somber expression.

  Balam nodded once, his pale, bulbous head moving down then up like some bizarre perpetual-motion executive toy. “She doesn’t know the danger that she is in,” he observed quietly. “I have shielded her from that all her life.”

  Brigid began to speak, but she stopped, allowing Balam’s words to sink in. “Do you believe that she’s in danger right now?”

  Balam gazed at the innocent child with his dark, fathomless eyes. “She has been in danger since the day she was born,” he stated, “and indeed, before then, when she was conceived. You know her position in the Annunaki pantheon, Brigid Baptiste. I hardly need remind you, of all people, of the dark path of destiny that stretches before her.”

  “No, of course not,” Brigid agreed. She had been there when Little Quav had become a bargaining chip in the hostilities between Annunaki Overlord Enlil and the Cerberus team, was well aware of how Balam’s intervention and graceful solution had saved countless lives. Still, there was something in Balam’s voice, the way he had raised this point now, that nagged at Brigid’s mind, even though she could not put her finger on it.

  “Would this Ontic Library have any bearing on Qua—Ninlil,” Brigid corrected herself, using the child’s predestined Annunaki name. Little Quav glanced up for a moment at the start of her name, then turned back to her game.

  In answer to Brigid’s query, Balam nodded solemnly again, his lips sealed.

  “How?” Brigid asked, the question barely a whisper.

  “The knowledge held in the library would doubtless show of her renewed existence and would be sufficient to locate her,” Balam stated, balling his fingers into a fist, “and hence take her. Potentially, an individual with that knowledge could fold space, reach for her out of the ether like some astral kidnapper.”

  Brigid felt suddenly cold, as though someone had stepped on her grave. A few feet before her, the light-haired three-year-old girl continued to play, singing to herself now and then as she drummed her palms against the medical bowl Reba had left her in lieu of other toys. As if sensing Brigid’s eyes on her, the blond-haired girl turned and handed her the inflated rubber glove. Brigid bounced the five-finger balloon from one palm to the other before knocking it in the air and batting it back to the laughing little girl. “Here you go, munchkin,” Brigid said quietly, the last word so subtle that it was almost indistinguishable from a breath.

  Brigid had had a child, a little girl called Abigail who had been taken from her when she was five years old. Except Abigail had never existed; she had been a part of a false memory that had ensnared the Cerberus warriors within a hell cage called the Janus Trap. Abi had never existed, and yet she had awoken something within Brigid, triggered something that Brigid had only barely been aware of up until that moment.

  Balam looked at the beautiful redhead for a moment, a quizzical furrow appearing on his immense brow.

  Brigid shook her head, partly in response and partly to clear it of the morbid and pointless thoughts that teased her of Abigail, the girl who never was. “Would it be likely that the Ontic Library is simply breaking apart of its own accord?” she asked. “Perhaps through age?”

  “Never,”
Balam told her. “The place has been accessed, most probably for the first time in many millennia, for it dates as far back as Anu himself.”

  Anu, Brigid knew, was the first of the Annunaki to visit Earth, a spiritual forefather to their invading race.

  “Only an Annunaki would access this place, Brigid,” Balam told her with gravity. “No one else.”

  “Not even by accident?” Brigid asked.

  “No,” Balam assured her. “The librarians would never allow that.”

  “Librarians,” Brigid said with a knowing smile. She herself was a librarian by trade, which was to say an archivist in her days in Cobaltville.

  “You’ll see,” Balam said, and the trace of a smile crossed his own pasty features. As Balam spoke those words, Brigid watched his expression alter slightly, wondering that she saw something in his oddly shaped face. She felt it was a glimmer of something not altogether kindly.

  Chapter 7

  Inside the washroom, Lakesh ran his hands under the faucet, dampening them with water before splashing it over his face in an effort to revive himself. He really did feel tired, but wasn’t sure whether he was just imagining physical symptoms or was mentally exhausted.

  He was getting old; he recognized it from the last time, when he had reached almost 150 thanks to organ transplants and other medical magic. When Enlil, in his guise as Sam the Imperator, had granted Lakesh a nanobot-rich nutrient bath that revived a measure of his youth, Lakesh had never expected it to have hidden strings attached.

  “Curse me for a fool,” Lakesh muttered as he watched the water drain down his lined face in the washroom mirror before the basin.

  Everything that Enlil ever did had had strings attached. The man—creature?—was Machiavellian in his planning, every loss a win, every benefit a blight. And so it was proving this time, and Lakesh cursed himself once more for being surprised.

  Lakesh looked once more at the man in the mirror, the familiar lines around his eyes and over his forehead and at the corners of his mouth.

  “What now, old man?” he muttered, wiping the last of the dripping water from his face with a paper towel from the dispenser beside the basin. “What now, you old, worn-out thing?”

  WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE observation room, Lakesh found Donald Bry, Kane, Grant, Clem Bryant and Reba DeFore talking in muted tones among themselves as they waited for him. The tiny room felt cramped and warm with all those bodies in it, and Lakesh found himself backed up against the closing door. While the others spoke, Lakesh noted that oceanographer Clem was peering with some interest at the weird, alien figure of Balam through the one-way glass, a look of vexation on his usually calm features.

  “Are these the creatures?” Lakesh asked, indicating the bag in Grant’s hand as he held out his hands.

  “This is them,” Grant growled, passing the bag to the Cerberus operational leader.

  Lakesh peered in the bag for a moment, before distracting Clem’s attention away from the alien figure sitting a few feet away on the other side of the reinforced glass pane. “Do you have any idea what they are, Mr. Bryant?”

  The ever-unruffled Clem Bryant looked faintly self-conscious for a moment, letting out a single bark of laughter before he spoke. “I have an idea, of course,” he began.

  The other people in the room had ceased their own conversations to listen to Clem’s clear explanation now, and the man embraced taking the lead and playing to this small, intimate audience.

  “I must say that I could not identify the specific type, given the rather limited time I was given with the creatures, but certain things are immediately clear from examining them.” Clem removed the largest of the mollusks from the bag, holding it up and pointing out certain aspects. “The shell is quite thick for such a small creature, and it employs a double layer between which is a vacuum—nature’s equivalent of insulated glazing. This implies it is designed to withstand exceptional pressures, and that leads me to believe its natural habitat is deep in the ocean, where water pressure is that much greater—the equivalent of living in an environment with very heavy gravity.”

  Clem turned the shell over in his hand, allowing it to catch the light so that the oil-slick rainbow pattern played across its surface. “There is almost no color to the shells themselves,” he explained. “The rainbow coruscation effect you see is created where the outer and inner shells meet. In the darkness of the ocean, these creatures would likely appear a dull, muddy brown, so they would seem to have no use for color—they’re certainly not attracting mates or repelling predators through such vibrancy, and it’s worth keeping in mind that many deep-sea creatures don’t see color anyway.

  “They do have a complex genetic structure, however. The double shell is one indicator of that, and I’m certain that fuller analysis would yield some fascinating information.”

  “So what are they?” Kane grumbled impatiently.

  “That is an answer I don’t have,” Clem admitted, “but that shouldn’t come as a surprise. The deepest levels of the ocean have remained a largely unexplored environment, but we do know that there are creatures there that would be unable to survive in shallower waters, much as we cannot survive indefinitely beneath the waves.”

  Nodding, Kane leaned across Clem and pressed his extended finger on the one-way glass. “So, spin it for us quick, Clem—are these things naturally Earth critters?”

  Clem looked bemused for a second until he realized that Kane was pointing at the unearthly frame of Balam. “There’s no evidence here to suggest that these creatures don’t belong on our planet, Kane,” he assured the ex-Mag.

  Kane threw a significant look at Grant, the two of them now certain that this was the first inkling of what it was they were about to deal with.

  “Earth stuff we’ve got a chance with,” Grant rumbled in reply to Kane’s unspoken question.

  Lakesh opened the plastic bag and invited Clem to replace the shell before he led the way out of the room and through to the interrogation chamber itself, with Clem, Kane and Grant following. Reba and Donald remained behind, watching through the one-way glass of the observation cubicle in case they were needed.

  Inside the interrogation chamber, Brigid continued to speak to Balam, her tone soft. “Does it have locks?” she asked him.

  Balam shook his huge, egglike head. “It has no need of such,” he explained. “The librarians take care of all intruders.”

  “Then if we go there,” Brigid began, “you could show us…”

  “No,” Balam said, an infinite sadness in his voice. “I must not travel to the Ontic Library. I would be unwelcome there, and I have other responsibilities, as you can appreciate.”

  The munchkin, Brigid thought.

  Brigid turned then as the door to the interrogation room opened, her emerald eyes flashing as the quartet of personnel shuffled in. She was somewhat surprised to see Clem Bryant among them, knowing that Clem had largely been kept out of the hands-on side of their operations, sticking primarily to his role in the facility’s cafeteria. Ever polite, Clem nodded once in acknowledgment of Brigid, but she could see his blue eyes yearning to openly stare at Balam.

  “My friends,” Balam said in his soft-spoken manner as Lakesh took a chair before him on the other side of the empty table.

  Carefully, his eyes fixed on Balam for any trace of reaction, Lakesh placed the plastic bag on the desk between them and shook loose the contents. “Do you recognize these?” he asked.

  Balam visibly reared back in his seat, dragging his long-fingered hands across the desktop and away from the dead creatures in their sparkling rainbow shells. As ethereal and graceful as he was, the movement seemed somehow out of place with Balam’s normal manner. Finally, noticeably bringing himself back to his usual serenity, Balam spoke. “Have you or your people touched these, Lakesh?”

  “Yes,” Lakesh said with a definite nod. “What are they?”

  “They are exactly what they appear to be,” Balam said. “Genetic information taken form in flesh.”


  Kane, who had taken up a position before the doorway in subconscious imitation of a guardsman, growled a single word. “Meaning?”

  “The library holds information within its reef,” Balam explained, gesturing to the unusual mollusks. “This is the library. This is a part of the storehouse of all Annunaki knowledge.”

  Kane shook his head, anger and exhaustion vying for prominence in his mind. It was always like this with Balam, he recalled—like trying to figure out a riddle in a dream. “Couldn’t they have just written it down in books?” he challenged.

  “DNA sequencing is a far superior way of containing dense reams of information,” Balam replied with no sense of malice. “Far more elaborate than the modified grunts of a race of semievolved monkeys.”

  The room fell to silence as the Cerberus personnel took in the gravity of that statement, but the silence lasted only for a moment. Little Quav began to sing again, running across the room on her stubby legs until she was standing beside Balam. She stood there, looking up at him, her small hands tugging at his indigo robe. “Pick up, Uncle Bal-bal,” she said.

  Balam leaned down and scooped the child from the floor, holding her close and rocking her in his arms, stroking at her white-blond hair with his inhumanly long fingers. “We shall be leaving soon, Quav,” he told her in his soft, reassuring voice. “Not long to wait now.” As he spoke, Balam’s dark eyes flicked up, looking across to the Cerberus people he considered allies if not actual friends.

  Brigid nodded, seeing the whole picture now in her mind. The Annunaki were masters of genetics. Little Quav was a genetic sequence, a code designed like a butterfly’s chrysalis that would one day open into the goddess Ninlil. These mollusks were the same, sequences of DNA that held codes and protocols and a thousand other subtleties than humankind might never fully comprehend.

  “I know you can’t join us, but would you show us how to reach the Ontic Library?” Brigid asked.