Distortion Offensive. James Axler
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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.
“I am afraid,” Balam began with gravity, “that the nature of my visit is not a social one.”
Chapter 5
Kane’s field team returned to Cerberus in the early afternoon, using their Manta craft to travel cross-country and back to the hidden mountain base. They carried with them a small clutch of the strange mollusks that they had found washed up along the Hope beachfront. They had found a half dozen in all, each a different size but with the basic sluglike body inside a whirling, oily-rainbow-colored shell. Each one was dead when they found it, but neither Kane, Brigid nor Grant could locate any live examples in their brief jaunt along the coast. All three had tried digging into the sand in a few spots, both wet and dry, in case the unusual mollusks were burying themselves, but they failed to find any further examples. It seemed that the creatures really were just washing in on the tide, a whole host of dead animals from who knew where.
Travel by Manta was swift and almost silent as the slope-winged vehicles powered through the skies. The Mantas were propelled by two different types of engine—a ramjet and solid-fuel pulse detonation air spikes—allowing them to operate both in atmosphere and beyond it as subspace vehicles.
When Kane, Grant and Brigid arrived back at the Cerberus hangar bay, they were instructed to meet with Lakesh immediately in one of the secure interrogation rooms located in the subbasement.
“Do we have time to wash up?” Kane asked.
“And maybe get a consult on these?” Brigid added, brandishing a small clear plastic pouch full of the recovered shellfish.
The guard on duty shrugged, urging them to meet with Lakesh immediately. “Those were my orders, guys,” he explained. “Lakesh seemed pretty serious about it.”
Grant shot Kane a look as the trio exited the hangar area and headed to the internal stairwell. “‘Serious’ doesn’t sound good,” he muttered.
Kane offered a lopsided grin to his partner as he brushed dark hair from his face. “Maybe he’s throwing us a surprise party,” he proposed.
“You don’t believe that, do you?” Grant questioned, chuckling a little despite himself.
In response, Kane held up his hands innocently as he started to make his way down the echoing staircase.
Taking the bag from Brigid, Grant told them he would go find their resident oceanographer while the pair of them placated Lakesh. “I’d sooner get these checked out as quickly as possible,” he explained.
At the bottom of the stairs, the subbasement featured one long corridor painted a dull shade of off-white, with stairwells at both ends and a goods elevator located centrally along one wall. The corridor stretched almost the complete length of the Cerberus redoubt, a vast distance in all, and there were numerous rooms located to the left and right, among them a firing range, vast storage lockers and several interrogation and incarceration rooms. At the far end of the corridor, a set of double doors led into the recycling area, where food and other trash were deposited so that the facility could remain fully self-sufficient in case of an extended siege.
Kane pulled open the heavy fire door at the base of the stairs and led the way down the corridor, still light on his feet despite the extended period he had spent cooped up in the cockpit of the Manta. Brigid followed, gazing left and right in an effort to locate the room where Lakesh was working. Roughly one-third of the way down the long corridor, two armed guards stood to attention as they saw two members of the fabled Cerberus field crew enter.
“Dr. Singh has requested—” one of them began when he saw Kane and Brigid, but Kane brushed the remark away.
“We’ve heard this tune already, second verse same as the first,” Kane assured him. “Just tell us which door.”
The guard led the way to an interrogation room located close to the goods lift on the left-hand wall. “In there,” he explained.
There was a wide pane of reinforced one-way glass along the wall, and Kane peered through it, looking at the occupants of the bland, simple room. There was a standard table, bolted to the floor as a security measure, along with a smattering of chairs, some of them stacked at the side of the room farthest from the table. A large cork notice board occupied one wall, with a similar, smaller board decorating the wall opposite the one-way glass.
Inside, Kane could see Lakesh and Donald Bry sitting on one side of the desk, addressing questions to their visitor. A little way across the room, much to Kane’s surprise, Cerberus physician Reba DeFore was jiggling a little girl on her knee as she proceeded to give her a health checkup. The girl had feathery white-blond hair tied back in a ponytail, and wide, expressive blue eyes. As Kane watched, DeFore, whose ash-blond hair had been tied up in an elaborate braid that left corkscrew-like strands dangling beside her ears, tickled the little girl’s tummy to make her laugh before peering into her mouth with the tiny light of her handheld otoscope.
Kane turned his attention back to the weird humanoid figure that sat at the far side of the desk with Lakesh and Donald, recognizing it instantly. “Looks like Balam’s come to pay us a visit,” he growled as his beautiful colleague joined him.
“And is that Little Quav?” Brigid asked, tapping at the glass to indicate the blond-haired child who sat on Reba’s lap. Brigid was clearly delighted to see the girl. “She’s grown so.”
Kane reached for the door, turning the handle. “Why don’t we go say hello?”
With that, the tall ex-Mag pushed open the door and made his way inside, like a jungle cat stalking warily into a cage.
“Balam, pal o’ mine,” Kane spit through clenched teeth, his eyes focused on the weird, alien form at the desk, “it’s been a long time.”
“Not too long I hope, Kane,” Balam chirped, his doleful eyes gazing at the new entrants as they filed into the room.
“It could never be too long,” Kane growled sarcastically.
Lakesh and Donald turned from the desk, and Lakesh gave Kane a warning look. “Now, Kane, let’s show some hospitality toward our honored visitors.”
“Hospitality,” Kane repeated, speaking the word as if it were something jagged that had just cut his tongue. “Right.”
Feeling the tension in the room, Brigid stepped forward and diffused it with her bright, sincere smile. “How have you been, Balam? How’s Little Quav?”
“I have been keeping myself to myself,” the gray-skinned alien replied simply in his softly spoken manner. “Quav seems to have settled into life in Agartha well. We have found some places where she may delight in play.”
Brigid laughed when she heard that, turning her attention from the strange, alienlike humanoid at the far end of the room to the playful child on Reba’s lap. “Listen to you, you old softie,” Brigid said. “I never pictured you for the doting parent type.” This was not entirely true, of course, for Brigid knew that Balam had at least two sons who had been raised in the underground city of Agartha. Still, it did genuinely amuse her to hear Balam speak with such a gentle tone of real emotion.
“Children change us,” Balam admitted, his sinewy, six-fingered hands weaving through the air in a nervous tic. “They have the ability to show our true faces, no matter how we try to hide them.”
Resting