James Axler - Distortion Offensive

“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.

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.