Distortion Offensive (10 page)

Curiously, everything shone in this new reality, everything glowed and sparkled as if it had been sprinkled with icing sugar. The colors were so unusual, colors that Brigid's mind couldn't seem to truly grasp, had no name for despite seeing them, like a dream half-remembered.

Could it be that we never saw the things we had no name for? Were we blind to the world because we couldn't name everything within it?
she wondered.

Brigid became conscious of something else, too, of the way her heart was beating in her chest, flurrying rapidly to keep pace with the emotions that were running through her. She felt hot, clammy.

Tentatively, warily, Brigid stood, her eyes roving around the kitchen.

“Baptiste?” Kane asked again, his voice strangely so close to her now, almost as though it came from within her. Perhaps that was the
anam chara
bond they shared, perhaps that was how it should manifest, as voices from each other's body, each other's soul.

She swayed as she tried to take a step, discovering that her sense of balance had altered. “It is the weirdest feeling, Kane,” she explained, her voice seeming somehow to come from both her and him at the same time.

“Tell me,” Kane said, his voice low and encouraging.

“Like seeing the building blocks,” Brigid said in wonder. “The building blocks of time.”

Lakesh was still sitting at the little table by the wall, but his reaction to the effects of the mollusk was very different. Where the hallucinogen had seemed to expand Brigid's sense of vision, Lakesh felt his own eyes burning. They were alien things, eyes not his own. This was
true, for Lakesh had had new eyes implanted in his skull when his own had dimmed with age.

Unlike Brigid, he ceased to concern himself with external input and instead his mind turned within, a scientist looking for answers he knew he had to have. He felt his heart beating, drumming against the walls of his chest in its quest to keep moving, to keep pumping. The blood rushed through arteries and veins, with the fiery intensity of neat whisky.

Lakesh looked down, gazing at his hands as if they were things he held and not things he was. Ridges and bumps, a mountain range of age displayed in every trough and valley. Then, disconcertingly, he became aware of the layers of his hands, the skin that wrapped the parcel of flesh and blood and bone. He tried for a moment to flex his fingers, found that he couldn't, as if he had forgotten how to move. He closed his eyes, and beneath the lids he could see the veins there pulsing, rippling before his vision as red blood cells hurtled oxygen through his body. Somewhere deep inside, Mohandas Lakesh Singh felt his heart skip, his breathing cease and restart, as though his autonomic functions were failing; it was his brain he knew, the burning of the brain raging through him like a forest fire. He was witness here to something no person could prepare for, something no person should witness. A level of knowledge that went beyond simple fact, into a pureness that underpinned everything.

“Hold it together, you old fool,” Lakesh chastised himself, though he could not tell if he had said the words out loud or merely thought them.

The aftertaste of the mollusk flesh swilled around his tongue, an acrid vinegar that he could not seem to shake even after swallowing the second dead creature.

Something moved before him, swirling in his vision, and he realized with a start that his eyes were still closed, that whatever he saw was only within him. Black on white, the stripes of a zebra, a pattern that promised to make sense but would not resolve, no matter how hard he studied it. Something else moved then, whirring in front of him, and he opened his eyes, seeing the figures moving all about him. It had been their shadows that had played on his eyelids, their movements that he had interpreted as zebra stripes amid the redness of his own skin. Brigid was standing, but she looked pained, her body bending in on itself like the crooked man who lived in the little crooked house.

As Lakesh watched, Brigid staggered, seemingly in slow motion yet still right, falling forward, stumbling into the wall before him and lurching onward, as if lost. The powerful figure of Kane was following just a few steps behind the redheaded woman, and Lakesh could hear his voice calling to her, but it wasn't in the room where he was. Instead the voice seemed to come from the far end of a torpedo tube, a muffled, eerie echo like the voice of a spirit, of Biblical God.

Brigid's hair seemed so bright in the lights now that it shimmered like flame, the reds glowing and burning, glowing and burning. In fascination, Lakesh watched it, wondering why it didn't hurt, what all those flames might hide.

Baptiste herself was muttering something over and over. Two paces away, Kane could hear them for what they were—nonsense words:
“Namu amida butsu.”

Brigid's lips continued to move and her eyes darted back and forth as she tried to make sense of sensory input that seemed to change too rapidly for her. The swirl of air hung before her, its currents moving around
and around in circles and curlicues. It was hypnotic, drawing her full attention so that she had to make a conscious effort to not look at it, to not be trapped by it like some awful, mesmeric thing.

Beyond that swirl of air, Brigid saw the people and the shadows that they cast and, as she forced her eyes to focus past those beautiful currents of the air, she saw something hiding in those shadows as they played over the walls. The black of the shadows held red, a trace of rich scarlet amid the darkness. The word came back to her, horrifying and familiar, and suddenly her lips stopped their incessant
“namu amida butsu”
movement and she opened her mouth wide and unleashed an ear-piercing scream.

As Brigid began to scream, Kane reached and grabbed her, pulling her away from where she had lurched against the wall as if drunk, clutching her to his chest. “Baptiste,” he urged. “Baptiste, snap out of it. Deep breaths. Snap out of it now.”

Beside Kane, Reba DeFore was readying a hypo of sedative, wondering if she should act. She looked at Kane for approval and he shook his head.

“Wait,” he instructed. “Give her a moment. She'll come around—won't you, Baptiste?”

Brigid seemed to ignore him. It was almost as if she was no longer aware of his presence. She pushed against him, leaning on his chest with all her weight, as though she was trying to shove him off his feet.

Kane stood firm, his legs well spaced to provide support as the screaming woman pushed at him. “Snap out of it, Baptiste,” he urged again, drawing all the authority of his Magistrate vocal coaching into his command.

For a moment, nothing happened. And then, as abruptly as she had started, Brigid stopped shrieking,
stopped pushing at Kane with all her might. Now, like a lifeless doll, she sagged against him as he drew her close, and Kane found himself propping her up as her whole body began to slump like a rag doll.

When he looked at her, Kane saw that Brigid had buried her face in his chest, hiding her eyes from the bright lights of the kitchen like a frightened animal. Her shoulders were moving up and down as if she was struggling to breathe, as if she were crying in great racking sobs. But she seemed normal now, no longer tripping out.

“It's okay, Baptiste,” Kane said, emphasizing her name each time he spoke. “It's okay now.”

Across the room, Lakesh still sat at the table with Clem Bryant standing close by. Lakesh had been silent throughout Brigid's strange episode, and he had barely moved since imbibing the flesh of the second shellfish. As Kane watched, the Cerberus leader drew his shaking hand close to his mouth and reached inside with the tips of his index and middle fingers.

“What the hell…?” Kane began, and he took a step toward Lakesh, still clutching on to the limp form of Brigid Baptiste.

Reba DeFore held up her hand to stop Kane from interfering. “I believe, even in his addled state, he knows just what he's doing,” she explained.

As Kane watched, Lakesh gagged and then pulled his hand away from his mouth, a rush of vomit bursting forth and splattering over the empty plate and table before him. Kane cursed, and a few of the cooks in the immediate area called out, well aware of the hygiene implications of Lakesh's act. Clem hushed them with a word.

Lakesh continued vomiting, bringing up a watery
drizzle of oily yellow gunk until the gunk turned to nothing more than foamy spittle. After thirty seconds or so, Lakesh's vomiting subsided to dry heaving, and he drew a deep, pained breath. Clem knelt beside him, pulling a handful of fresh napkins from a loaded dispenser and handing them to Lakesh.

“Here, Lakesh,” he urged. “Deep breaths and I'll get you some more water.”

“Th-thank you, Clem,” Lakesh said, his eyelids flickering as he struggled to take in the scene around him. After a moment, his eyes fixed on Kane, who still stood clutching Brigid's shaking form close to him. Kane helped her drink her own glass of water.

“How is Brigid?” Lakesh asked, his voice sounding a little hoarse from the strain he had just placed on his throat by forcing himself to disgorge the weird mollusks.

“She completely freaked out,” Kane admitted. “What the hell were you two seeing?”

“Perhaps the wonders of the universe, my friend. I'm not sure,” Lakesh said vaguely. “I started to become caught up within myself, trapped in the ego, I think—inner space—and I knew that if I didn't eject this stuff from my system it would overwhelm me. I'd be trapped looking inward forever.”

“You're overreacting,” Kane said, though he didn't feel as sure of his words as he tried to sound. “Those kids we saw in Hope came out of it and seemed normal pretty quick.”

“How long between imbibing the flesh and their return to normalcy?” Lakesh queried.

Kane thought for a moment, then gave up. “Fair point,” he said. “We weren't there when they ate the stuff.”

After taking a long draw from the fresh glass of water that Clem had provided him, diluting whatever vestiges of the mollusks remained in his system, Lakesh began to speak once more. “This is a powerful—and I use this term with reticence—hallucinogen. Its effects began almost instantaneously…”

“You ate two,” Kane reminded him.

“But neither was very big, Kane,” Lakesh continued. “I can understand why Balam was so concerned about humans even touching them. They are quite exceptionally powerful and effective in altering one's perception field.”

“Reckless is what I call it,” Clem muttered, shaking his head.

“I agree,” Lakesh said, “but, as I said before, sometimes one has to learn through doing.”

Still propped up in Kane's arms, Brigid began to move, pushing herself away from him.

“You okay?” Kane asked, and Lakesh echoed his query a second after.

“My head is swimming,” Brigid said, “but I wouldn't want to eat a plateful of those!”

Lakesh looked woozy as he sat at the table, where Clem had removed the vomit-drenched plate and was cleaning the countertop with a cloth dampened with sterilizing solution. “I would suggest water,” Lakesh proposed, “and lots of it. It should dilute the effects Brigid is still feeling.”

Reba agreed.

As Kane paced across the room to the water cooler, Brigid continued to speak, not really addressing anyone but simply following her natural instinct to archive information. “This is so weird,” she said. “I should feel scared, but I don't. I feel tense, but not scared. Just a
sense of discomfort. It's almost like I had too much sensory input at once and my mind couldn't process it. Whatever is in those sea creatures, it has a crazy effect on the human brain.”

“I quite agree,” Lakesh said, feeling the beginnings of a headache itching at his skull.

“Like Eris's Apple of Discord,” Clem reminded them both. “You've seen simultaneous, conflicting views of the world and been unable to process which is the truth, for perhaps they both are.”

Kane returned with a new glass of water, which he handed to Brigid. “I think it's time we all found out what this library is all about, then, don't you?”

Less than an hour later, twin Manta craft soared through the air, glistening in the rays of the midday sun. They were like two streaks of lightning as they surged through the cloudless skies above the ruins of Snakefishville in their swift pursuit toward the coast. In the passenger seat within the tight cockpit of the lead aircraft, Clem Bryant peered through the thin window down at the shattered ruins below.

“Well, there's no getting away from it—I suppose I'm in the big leagues now,” he muttered as the ruins rushed beneath him while the craft continued on its urgent errand.

Sitting in the pilot's seat before Bryant, his head entirely encased in a domelike helmet of the same color bronze as the graceful craft's sloping wings, Grant turned as if cocking an ear at his passenger. “What was that, buddy?” he asked.

“Nothing important,” Clem admitted, idly stroking at the whiskers of his goatee beard. “I was just thinking about how this is a step up for me. Going on a field mission in one of these amazing spaceships. I rather feel like I've hired a limousine to take my sweetheart to the prom.”

Grant shrugged, not entirely comprehending Clem's twentieth-century nostalgia. “Well, I'm no substitute for Mariah,” he admitted.

Unseen by Grant, Clem sat up a little straighter in his seat, his eyes widening with surprise. “And why would you say that?” he asked.

Grant laughed. “‘Sweetheart'? I just thought that you and Mariah were—” He checked himself. “Well, it's none of my business.”

Clem turned his attention back to the view through the window once again, while Grant continued to pilot the almost-silent aircraft over the California coastline.

“It's funny,” Clem said after a minute or so, “but this will be the first time I've been under the ocean's surface in, well, whatever it is—two hundred years.”

“You're a freezie,” Grant pointed out, aware that Clem had spent two hundred years in suspended animation on the Manitius Moon base. “Time's screwy for you. Why's that so funny?”

“Because it was only a couple of weeks ago that I was promising that I'd teach Mariah to scuba dive,” Clem admitted. “Just before her…well, accident, I suppose you'd call it. It's the first I'd really thought about it in a long time.”

Hidden beneath the faceplate of the pilot's helmet, a broad smile appeared on Grant's face. He knew from experience that love could make a fool of any man, but it was also the one thing that made everything that the Cerberus team endured worthwhile. Grant's own sweetheart—the beautiful Shizuka, leader of the Tigers of Heaven—had more than once saved his life, and not always in the traditional sense of removing him from harm's way. Having someone to live for could make all the difference in a harsh world.

As he considered that, Grant's thoughts turned unbidden to his colleagues Kane and Brigid. Neither one of
them seemed to be able to commit to a real relationship, and the whole thing seemed all the more messed up because they shared their
anam chara
link, that special bond of soul friends. Some had proposed that this meant the couple would eventually be lovers; they had even been shown prospective futures where that appeared to be the case, although the validity of those visions was ever in question given the duplicitous nature of their many enemies. No, their bond to each other seemed to have settled into an almost siblinglike arrangement, not romantic love so much as a deep concern for the welfare of the other. Grant smiled. They sure as hell bickered like siblings; he had seen that with his own eyes.

Both Kane and Brigid had taken lovers, that was true. Most recently, Brigid had begun a tentative relationship with Daryl Morganstern, a handsome, advanced mathematician from the Cerberus personnel roster. Yet it seemed, to Grant at least, that the
anam chara
bond that his two friends shared somehow scuppered any chance of long-term fulfillment in a relationship, as if the pair's very closeness was their downfall. It was the old trap—they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.

Grant turned his full attention back to piloting the Manta as a warning icon appeared on his all-encompassing heads-up display to inform him that they were coming within range of their destination. Whatever it was that Kane and Brigid did, he assured himself, they were fighting for something. Who knew? Maybe he was the only one of their tight trinity who needed to put a definite face on that nebulous goal.

 

F
LYING IN FORMATION BEHIND
Grant's vehicle, Kane piloted his own shimmering bronze Manta along the
Snakefish coastline and out over the sparkling, clear blue waves of the Pacific. Below, several fishing scows could be seen working near the shoreline, and Kane wondered if, even now, the fishermen might be netting more of the strange shellfish they had discovered on Hope's beach. He hoped not, given how Brigid and Lakesh had reacted—anyone foolish enough to eat them would be in for a tremendous surprise.

In the passenger seat situated directly behind the pilot, Brigid Baptiste sat with her eyes closed, going over everything Balam had told them in the preceding few hours. She was still feeling woozy from her experience with eating the mollusks. The effects had passed, but she had been left with an unspecified sense of discomfort, as if something had shifted deep inside her. In another time, in another situation, she might have called this feeling a hangover.

Kane flipped something on the dash console and the craft began to bank. He spoke briefly to Grant via their Commtact link, confirming their location.

“I'd guess we're about three minutes out, Baptiste,” Kane announced in a louder voice once he had broken the radio contact. “You feeling any better?”

Brigid assured him she was. “Just a touch of nausea. Can you fly less bumpy maybe?” she joked.

“Sure,” Kane agreed. For a moment, he concentrated on angling the graceful aircraft around, following the path Grant was charting through the cerulean skies. Then, partially by way of conversation, partially to air something that was preying at the back of his mind, he spoke up again, directing a question at his ferociously intelligent colleague. “Can you believe all this?”

“All what?” Brigid asked, concentrating on keeping her lunch down as turbulence rocked the aircraft.

“This whole undersea-library shtick,” Kane elaborated. “Living creatures that work as books. Does that not strike you as a bit nutso?”

For just a moment, Brigid was taken aback. Kane was usually cool, not one to get himself too personally involved in a given situation. Perhaps, she thought, the sight of Little Quav had disturbed him.

“You hear me back there, Baptiste?” Kane prompted, raising his voice just a little over the sounds of air rushing all about their remarkable vehicle.

“I guess we're all ‘books' of DNA,” Brigid began, “if you think about it. There's so much we don't really know about the double-helix code that makes up living things. There are whole reams of data therein, right there within our own bodies, that appear to serve no purpose. They call it junk DNA, legacy data that has remained with us through the evolutionary cycle even though it's no longer required. Retrotransposons and pseudogenes—there's a lot of crap in our systems, Kane, much more than most people realize.”

As Brigid spoke, Grant's voice sounded over Kane's Commtact once more, informing him that they were one minute away from their final staging point, after which there would be no turning back. Kane acknowledged that with a word, banking his Manta to stay in line with Grant's own Manta.

“So, all this junk DNA,” Kane said, picking up on his discussion with Brigid, “could hold—what?—book-smart information?”

Brigid let out a sharp bark of laughter at Kane's obstinacy. “I rather suspect that the terms
book
and
library
are words of convenience that Balam employed to help us comprehend the rather unusual situation that we're entering.”

“Which is to say,” Kane said, “don't take them so literally.”

“Exactly.”

“It just makes my head reel when I think about this stuff,” Kane admitted. “I mean, we've dealt with a lot of strange crap, but this—the stakes involved, the outright alienness of the whole concept—well, it's huge.”

“The ocean is huge,” Brigid reminded Kane, “and it makes up two-thirds of the planet's surface. There are life-forms that we've never seen. The Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia is home to untold thousands of different creatures, so many that no one has ever been able to adequately catalog them all.”

“But are they all walking libraries?” Kane asked lightly.

“Who knows?” Brigid said with a degree more seriousness than even she expected.

Just then, Grant's voice came over the receiver of Kane's Commtact once again. “Staging point,” he stated. “Say when.”

Kane looked below, peering through the glowing data feed that the Manta's scanning equipment was providing on his helmet's heads-up display. They were eighteen miles out from the coastline, and it looked—rather disappointingly in Kane's opinion—like any other part of the ocean. Blue waters swirled below, the gentle waves making the afternoon sunlight twinkle across its surface, the white foam bursting into existence as opposing waves clapped together. Unlike at the coastline where the sea was an enticing, light cyan, here that blue seemed darker and more ominous.

“By your mark,” Kane stated over the Commtact.

He and Grant had discussed their plan of approach before leaving the Cerberus redoubt, and it had been
agreed that Clem Bryant should be in the lead vessel as, with his oceanographer background, he had the greatest experience of situations of this sort. Thus, Grant would lead the way through the watery depths on a curving vector while Kane would follow in his own Manta at a close clip, keeping pace with his colleague while in a suitable position to provide backup support if needed. What that backup might be, no one was quite sure. Neither Manta had any armament; their offensive capabilities were nil. But keeping within line of sight while under the ocean seemed the most practical approach; if one vehicle met with trouble, the other could hopefully assist while retaining a safe distance from suffering the same indignity. They had no real idea of what it was they were to face here, and Kane wanted to be prepared for any eventuality.

“Submerging in five,” Grant confirmed.

“Acknowledged,” Kane stated. “Stay sharp.”

Seated behind Grant, Clem took a deep breath, listening as the pilot counted down aloud. Then, Grant powered the Manta high in the air, looping it as he gained momentum before entering the water like a sleek dart, the aerodynamic form kicking up the barest minimum of splash in its wake as it disappeared beneath the rolling blue waves. Behind Grant's Manta, Kane followed in his own craft, swooping so close to the ocean's surface that spume was kicked into the air by his vehicle's passage, before lunging into the air and banking back down to follow Grant into the ocean depths on a parallel course.

The two sleek, identical aircraft hit the water at a five-second interval, their aerodynamic wings cutting through the surface with such grace that they barely created a mark by their passing. The Mantas were
transatmospheric and subspace vehicles, but they could also adapt to underwater environments, being utterly airtight and powered using air spikes.

And so they went. Down, down into the blue.

The ocean had its own currents, its own eddies. The surface turned and churned, glistening with a blueness that could seem inviting. But down, away from the sunlight, the ocean became a place of gloom, its creatures living lives spent in shadow. This was the environment that the Cerberus exiles now found themselves in.

In the lead Manta, Grant studied the sensory input from his craft's scanning device as an increasing amount of information made itself known on his heads-up display. The Manta crafts were surprisingly maneuverable under the ocean, and something within their makeup automatically adapted to the new environment, ensuring that they could travel seamlessly through the water. Perhaps not that surprising, Grant reminded himself—the alien craft's design seemed based on the undersea manta ray, which itself glided through the waters of the Pacific.

Still, the ocean buffeted the crafts like strong crosswinds, threatening to knock them from their intended path, and both Grant and Kane found themselves fighting with their control yolks as they hurried through the blue-green water.

Around them, fish and other creatures swam, darting out of their way as the metal hulks plummeted through the ocean depths. Things floated by, too, bubbling up to the surface in little pockets of air, and Kane felt sure he recognized several of the odd little shellfish that had washed ashore at Hope. Like so much else under the water's surface, the things were swirling with the
current, tossed this way and that as they slowly drifted to the white sunlight above.

Gradually, the water became darker as they moved farther and farther away from the sunbeams, and Grant found himself increasingly reliant on the scanning equipment aboard the Manta. He took the opportunity to ask Clem if things were okay.

“It's peculiar,” Clem admitted, “being back in the ocean like this. Especially traveling at such speed. I was seconded to some navy operations during my time back home,” he said, recalling his work in the twentieth century, “which involved some use of small, two-man submarines. Nothing this fast, however. Do you know how fast we're moving?”

Grant checked his displays, but they were designed for airspeed. He gave Clem that figure, and Clem translated it as about thirty knots—fast for undersea movement.

The weird, muffling effects of the liquid made it seem that much more alien, and Grant watched the counter increase as they got deeper and deeper into the vast body of water.

“It's curious,” Clem pointed out, “but I'm feeling no effects from the pressure. I wonder if we'll need to go through decompression when all this is over.”