James Axler - Distortion Offensive

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.