Distortion Offensive (20 page)

Kane's wrist went left and right as he pumped shots
down the creature's throat, feeling the kick of the Sin Eater in his hand as he peppered the beast's insides with bullets. From within, the creature started to disintegrate, wet chunks of flesh bursting from its torso and sailing across the room before slapping against the walls and floor with wet-sounding plops.

Without realizing it, Kane was slammed against the ground, his legs stumbling over each other as he absorbed the momentum generated by the fish-thing's struggle. Grant was at his side then, using the Copperhead to drill shots into the beast's side, taking huge chunks out of its flesh as they finally found a way through its armoured skin.

The teethlike spikes were pressing against Kane's shoulder now, and he growled in pain and frustration as he pumped more shots into the thing's guts. He could feel the creature struggling, finding its would-be prey a whole hell of a lot more feisty than it had bargained with. Sin Eater still blasting, Kane reached out with his free hand and plucked at his attacker's remaining eye socket, tearing its eyeball from the hole there in a loud squelch.

Finally, as its eyeball went sailing across the floor in a gummy mass, the fish creature relented, opening its jaw wide enough to allow Kane to get his arm free. He pulled his arm back swiftly, until just the end of the gun was still within the creature's nightmarish mouth. Then, aiming the Sin Eater's muzzle high, he pumped two shots into the roof of its mouth. With a loud squelch, the top of the beast's head exploded, and it lost all of its drive in a second, flopping lifelessly to the floor. Nose wrinkling in disgust, Kane removed his hand from the wreckage that had been a living thing just a moment before.

Standing over Kane, Grant looked at the squelchy mess of flesh and gunk that lay splattered across the floor like so much roadkill, even as the remaining creatures circled the two human intruders.

“Did I hear right?” Grant asked as Kane swept goo and innards from the length of his right arm. “Did you say that these things are fish?”

“Mutated,” Kane said, rising to his feet, “but basically—yeah, they're fish.”

“Care to elaborate?”

Instead of answering immediately, Kane whipped up the Sin Eater and blasted a stream of shots at one of the remaining creatures as it began charging at the two ex-Mags. “In a minute,” he shouted. “For now, just follow my lead.”

Seeing the monster barrel toward him, its jaws wide, Grant didn't need telling twice.

 

B
RIGID TOOK A STEADYING BREATH
as she sat on the jutting section at the side of the great hub. Using his short knife, Clem had uncovered enough of the inner workings of the creature that they could now see the main trunk of the second branchial vein.

“Are you absolutely certain that you want to do this?” Clem asked in a low, conspiratorial voice.

Brigid smiled tentatively. “Is anyone ever absolutely certain they want to do anything?” she asked in reply.

Clem nodded, realizing that Brigid's flippant words allowed her to draw strength as she prepared to leap into the unknown. He knew that the woman who now sat perfectly upright before him was just as terrified as he was. With a mixture of excitement and fear vying for attention in his racing mind, Clem leaned forward, reaching to a point just over Brigid's head, and he ran
the sharp edge of the blade across the thick vein that pulsed there. “Stand by,” he said.

Swiftly and deliberately, Clem made a small incision into the pulsing vein, pushing the knife firmly against the surface until a line of liquid oozed forth. Lacking the power of an artery, the wound did not spurt as one might have expected; it simply oozed in a line like sweat, colored white as milk, reminding Clem of pus oozing from a burst boil.

“Have you done it?” Brigid asked, trying to remain still as Clem worked the knife immediately above her.

“I've made an incision,” Clem replied, “and the wound's weeping. But it doesn't seem to—” He stopped midsentence, watching in fascination as the oozing pus ran slowly down the exterior of the vein, gathering speed with its descent.

“What is it?” Brigid asked, her voice a whisper.

The milky line of liquid split, and where one drop had existed now there were three, and they hurried down behind the bright cloud of Brigid's wavy, flamered hair. But as Clem watched he saw that the liquid wasn't simply pouring, following the path of least resistance in the way that liquid should act. No, instead it seemed to be reaching, probing,
feeling
at the air.

“Clem?” Brigid encouraged again, unsure of what was going on immediately behind her head.

Before Clem could find the words, one of those strange milk-white strands seemed to leap, like a cobra striking out at its prey, and the tip of the strand disappeared into Brigid's hair, its other end still connected to the pierced vein above her.

Brigid grunted, feeling something burning hot touch the lowest part of her scalp, just below the crown. It was incredibly hot, like the tip of a soldering iron, and for a
moment Brigid's breath came with staggered rapidity through gritted teeth.

“If it does bond with the user as you've theorized,” Clem told her, trying to sound reassuring, “then that's what it's doing now.”

“Hurts,” Brigid grunted, the word pinched between her clamped-shut teeth. And then the burning became worse, feeling like the throbbing burn of skin that had been tanned too quickly by the sun, a ceaseless ache of bad-then-worse, bad-then-worse.

Above Brigid's head, Clem watched as more strands of goo oozed from the thick vein, curling from it now like tendrils, reaching lower and lower as they grasped for Brigid's skull. A second off-white line probed out and snagged her, pushing through her mass of curling hair and pressing against her skull. As Brigid winced, yet another tendril found its way to her, and then another.

Clem watched, staggered, as twin horns seemed to emerge from the sides of the hub where he had exposed the vein, reaching around Brigid's forehead like two hands, the jagged projections interlinking like fingers to form that familiar crown around Brigid's forehead. Its surface was hard and multilayered, an intermingling of sharp briars locking together like a cage. Once again, the abstract thought came to Clem of how it looked like the crown of thorns worn by Jesus Christ in classic religious imagery, imagery long since forgotten in this future world that the twentieth-century oceanographer had woken up to.

Brigid closed her eyes as she felt the hot strings lash against her, worming their way into the back of her skull. It wasn't a piercing so much as an osmosis, a diffusion of that exceptional heat through the back of her
head and on, into the receptacles of her brain. Ahead of her now, too, things were emerging from the crownlike apparatus that had surrounded her head, reaching in with a blast of hot breath against her forehead, the heat playing into her frontal lobes. Her natural instinct was to break away, to run, but she clenched her fists and told herself to endure. This was a crazy chance, the odds so long they were meaningless, and yet the whole process seemed the only possibility they might have to expel Ullikummis and save the Ontic Library from the destruction his very presence was causing.

Ahead, Brigid could see the coral-like walls of the room, the hard, lumpy floor that stretched out before her in the eerie gloom of those little pools of blue-green light. As she looked, she became conscious of something else there now, too, at the very edges of her vision. She looked left and right but it remained frustratingly beyond her ability to view.

Redness.

That was what it was. A redness as of something's blood.

All around her, across Brigid's chest and at her ankles and her wrists, things writhed, snaking around her from polyps on the exterior of the organic hub of this exceptional library. Brigid was now only vaguely aware of such things, feeling them moving along her body like a marching army of ants. Instead, her awareness was shifting as she began to see more of the world that surrounded her, the structures that underpinned that world. Above, in the ocean, Brigid could see parts of the library structure breaking off, floating away as Ullikummis's influence reigned.

I should be afraid,
she told herself.

But she wasn't.

Recently, Brigid had been snared within a navigator's chair from an Annunaki starship. Organic technology, the chair had come to life in her presence, pulling her to it and clutching her close, sending sharp tendrils to pierce her skin that it might download its maps of the universe directly into her brain. At the time she had been terrified, the whole experience a perverse violation of her very being. Yet at the same time she had marveled at the star chart that played out for her eyes only, her rational mind appreciating the incredible artistry that had been brought to bear to create such a revelatory piece of equipment.

Now, it seemed to Brigid that her experience with the astrogation chair had been merely a dry run for what was happening to her here. She felt her brain begin to switch gear, shifting into a new mind-set as the burning sensation entered her thoughts.

“Here we go again,” Brigid whispered as she felt herself, along with all rational sense, plummet off the precipice of normalcy.

While Brigid was disappearing into the mental rabbit hole that was the data stream of the Ontic Library, Grant and Kane continued struggling with the savage, dog-size fish that had surrounded them at the far edge of the vast chamber.

“Follow my lead,” Kane had instructed, though he had been less sure of himself than he had sounded in that moment of bravado. His plan was a simple one; at least in the sense that it was direct. These monstrous, air-breathing fish-things had a hard armor of near-impenetrable scales that deflected all but the luckiest of shots. But from the inside, as he had proved, they were vulnerable. All they had to do was ensure that their bullets blasted into each creature's open mouth.

Which was easier said than done, of course, particularly with the ferocity and vigor that were required to make a difference and swing the tide of the battle.

“Drill them in the mouths,” Kane shouted as Grant brought his Copperhead subgun into play once more, peppering the area with a spray of bullets, countless spent shells littering the coral floor at his feet.

Even as Kane spoke, one of the two remaining creatures spun on itself and seemed to wink from existence in that baffling and utterly frustrating manner that Kane and Grant had witnessed during the earliest moments of this terrifying encounter.

“They're not disappearing,” Kane insisted.

“Run that by me again?” Grant demanded as he stood at Kane's shoulder, Copperhead blazing as the fish creature he was aiming at seemed to cease to exist.

“That's what clued me in,” Kane growled. “Fish move like nothing else on earth, doubling back on themselves so swiftly that they appear able to move through 180 degrees on the spot. These things are fast as hell, but they're still there—our eyes just can't follow quickly enough.”

As if to reinforce Kane's observation, Grant saw the green-scaled creature reappear off to his right, turning on the spot there and leaping toward him with its mouth widening to bite.

In a blur of instinct, Grant swung the Copperhead at the monster, his finger depressed on the trigger, sending a volley of bullets wide before he finally found his fast-moving target. Bullets pinged from the creature's hide, covering it in bright sparks of lightning where they hit and filling the air with dangerous ricochets.

Then the creature was on Grant, its jaws snapping shut as it attempted to bite off his face. Grant turned away, skipping backward on his toes as the thing dived through the air at him. It didn't dive, Grant corrected—it
swam.

A few feet away, Kane was facing his own enemy, as the last remaining fish creature prowled the surrounding area, its glassy, black eyes never leaving Kane's. The ex-Magistrate held his right arm stiff, the Sin Eater like a natural extension of the limb, as he waited for the kill shot.

“Come on, you little flounder,” Kane muttered. “Let's make fish sticks for dinner.”

Suddenly, the green-scaled creature turned, its tail
like back feet flapping against the uneven floor as it barreled forward, widening its vulgar double jaw as it hurried at its human prey.

Kane snapped off shot after shot from his Sin Eater, his aim never wavering as he pumped the 9 mm bullets down the beast's throat. Chunks of flesh ripped from the monster's ugly mouth as the bullets drilled past that keylike apparatus that formed its jaw.

At the last second, Kane leaped away, and the creature's mighty jaws closed shut on empty air with a loud snap.

As both Kane and the monster landed on the floor, Kane rolled away, bringing his pistol back up to bear as the hideous attacker turned to renew its savage attack. Kane blasted off another stream of deadly bullets as the monster charged at him. The green-hued fish turned then, as Kane continued to blast bullets in its direction, flitting out of his field of vision like an arrow in the air. His jaws clamped tightly together, Kane held the trigger of the Sin Eater in place and sprayed left and right in a continuous stream of fire. Incredibly—almost magically—the creature reappeared off to Kane's left as the bullets struck it, fumbling in its path before rolling over itself and crashing into the floor on its side with a noteworthy lack of grace.

Immediately, Kane leaped up and ran for the monster where it lay on the floor, its muscular, tail-like back legs flapping up and down as it tried to right itself, like a turtle rolled over on its shell. As it turned, Kane rammed his foot against the beast's side, just below the place where the fearsome double-jaw exterior met with its neckless body, the heel of his boot squelching into the fleshy triple gills that he could see opening and closing there. As the creature struggled in place, Kane brought
the barrel of his pistol down and unleashed a stream of shots in the creature's face, directing bullet after bullet into the monster's gaping mouth.

Grant's attacker, meanwhile, was hurtling at the powerfully built ex-Mag like a torpedo, its body rushing through the air like some runaway train. Grant kept the Copperhead trained on the creature as he darted left and right to avoid its mind-boggling attacks, blasting 4.85 mm bullets in its direction with every opportunity.

The air-breathing fish pounced across the room like some kind of spring, bounding off the hard surfaces of coral floor and walls as it renewed its attack on the Cerberus warrior. As it rushed at him again, Grant held his ground and snapped off a single shot from the Copperhead before the trigger clicked on empty. Incredibly, the ex-Mag was out of ammunition; he had had no time to reload during the furiously rapid battle.

The fish creature lunged at Grant's torso, even as the gun jammed on empty, and with quick thinking he brought up the solid barrel of the gun like a staff, using its abbreviated length to fend off his attacker.

With a decisive thrust, Grant rammed the Copperhead into the monster's gaping mouth, shoving it in between its jaws at a near-vertical angle. Even as the creature continued at him, Grant jabbed his left elbow into the side of its face, knocking it with incredible force.

The creature reared backward, toppling to the floor as it struggled with the subgun in its mouth.

Grant did not hesitate. He brought up his right arm, tensing his wrist tendons as he did so to bring his hidden Sin Eater into play. Grant's finger was already crooked when the guardless trigger slapped against it, and a spray of bullets spit from the Sin Eater, driving through
the air and drilling into the open mouth of the fish creature as it struggled on the floor.

The monster seemed to rock in place as the shots hurtled down its throat and into its gullet, ripping into its innards with gruesome finality. As Grant watched, his pistol's trigger still depressed, the shimmering green scales at the creature's side and back began to burst apart as the relentless bullets drilled through the body of the monster fish.

As his enemy flopped on its side, its body still shaking, Grant took a moment to look across to Kane. His partner was turning and walking away from a messy spray of flesh that covered the floor, all that remained of his own attacker.

Kane peered up and, seeing Grant watching him amid the wreckage of his own foe, he smiled and brushed a finger to his nose.

They had survived.

 

C
LEM JOINED THE TWO
ex-Mags over the wreckage of the strange air breathers a couple of minutes after the battle was over, checking warily to ensure that there was no chance of the creatures could renew their attack.

Grant was kneeling before the green-skinned animal he had drilled with bullets, working to free his Copperhead from the beast's now-locked jaws. “Dammit, Fido,” he growled, “playtime's over.”

With one final yank, Grant pulled the Copperhead free, falling on his butt as he tumbled backward. The weapon was slick with drool, and Grant bit back a curse as he wiped it down with the insides of his coat. The coat could be washed—having the weapon in working order was his more pressing concern just now.

“Well,” Clem said as he peered on the floor at the
three carcasses that lay in various states of disintegration, “you gentlemen certainly know how to make your presence felt.”

Self-consciously, Kane ran a hand through his dark hair before asking the oceanographer about Brigid.

“Miss Baptiste appears to be sleeping,” Clem explained, “much like the stone man there. She's hooked into the library structure now, and I've crossed the two branchial veins as she proposed. By her own suggestion, we're best off not disturbing her.”

Kane nodded, accepting the situation even if he did not particularly approve of it. He had been with Brigid on a recent reconnaissance mission in the Louisiana bayou. It was there that they had been introduced to what had been inaccurately described as a “voodoo chair,” and was in fact a surviving navigator's seat from the Annunaki mother ship,
Tiamat.
The navigator's seat had some hidden mechanism that had ensnared Brigid when she sat in it, tendrils snaking from its arms to smother her bare flesh. In so doing, the navigator's chair had bonded with the woman, projecting highly detailed, interactive star maps directly to her frontal lobe. However, the flesh-piercing price had been disconcerting and potentially lethal. Facing an enemy who specialized in organic technology, Kane considered, was proving to be rather more involved than their initial clashes with the Annunaki had led them to expect.

“So,” Clem asked, gesturing around at the scaly carcasses, “what were these things?”

“Fish,” Kane said. “At least, that's what I think they are. You're the expert, Clem. Want to weigh in?”

Clem peered at the creature that Grant had killed, for it seemed the most intact of the gruesome corpses. “There are certainly instances of fish that can exist out
of water for extended periods, so-called ambulatory or walking fish. The mudskipper and the African catfish eel can both snap prey from the land, and have shown the ability to live there for limited periods, in much the way of amphibians like frogs and toads. There are even reports of fish that have been seen to climb trees.”

Grant looked up as he reloaded his Copperhead subgun, raising a quizzical eyebrow at Clem's words. “Must make fishing trips an experience.”

“These things almost seemed to fly through the air,” Kane explained. “Is that normal?”

Clem produced his little two-inch blade from his pocket and prodded gently at the lifeless corpse sprawled before him. “Haven't you ever heard of flying fish?” he asked as he scored a line along the edge of the glistening green scales.

Kane watched patiently as Clem poked at the skin of the creature before moving across to the open wreckage of the one Kane had latterly dealt with.

“They're pretty big,” Clem pointed out, moving a chunk of bloody gut out of the monstrous corpse with the tip of his blade, “and they show a lot of traits one would more normally associate with mammals. This circulatory system is very unusual. It's almost as though it's been reverse engineered based on a nonaquatic design, like from a jackal or other canine.”

“Well, they're dead now,” Grant rumbled as he watched Clem work through the goo smeared on the floor. “The question is—can we expect any more of them?”

“No,” Clem replied.

“Well, that's a rel—” Kane began, but Clem wasn't finished.

“The question,” Clem said, “is what were they
eating down here?” He peered up to look at Grant and Kane. “Simple rule of survival—everything has to eat something.”

“What about the spiders?” Kane proposed.

Clem nodded. “Which in turn would be eating…?”

Kane shook his head in exasperation. “Where are you going with all this, Bryant?”

“These things,” Clem said, sweeping a hand at the bloody corpse next to him, “have been engineered. They've been created to live down here and protect this library construct. They're not alive. They may have taken on the properties of living creatures, but this is merely technology far in advance of anything we can create.”

“So, what,” Grant asked, “they're robots?”

“Even a robot needs an oil change,” Clem mused. “This is something that's far beyond that.”

As Clem spoke, there came a grotesque slurping sound from behind Grant, and all three men turned to see what was causing the commotion. The first creature, the one whose eye Kane had plucked out, seemed to be reconstituting itself before them, its bullet wounds sealing, the lost eyes re-forming like glistening, watery pools.

“What the—?” Kane spit. “We killed that thing.”

“Inherent problem with things that aren't alive,” Clem pointed out. “They can't be killed.”

The Cerberus warriors backed away as the now-standing creature began to scent the air in a renewed search for prey.