Distortion Offensive. James Axler

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      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.

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