Distortion Offensive. James Axler

distant as if he were just now waking up.

      Henny calmed the other people in the open shack with a few hushed words and a gesture before rising to consult with Edwards. “You just freaked out a little there, cowpoke,” she said in a low voice.

      Edwards wiped his fingers against the ridge of his brow, playing them along the bridge of his nose so hard that Henny saw white streaks of pressure appear there before fading once more into his natural skin color. “My head’s killing me,” Edwards growled. “Came on all of a sudden, a real pounding bastard of a thing.”

      “Do you ever suffer from migraines?” Henny queried.

      “Me? No.” Edwards shook his head. “Probably just tired, being cooped up in here for a day treating the locals in their filth. Reminds me of the Tartarus Pits back…” Edwards stopped. He was about to say “home” but realized he hadn’t been a Magistrate for a long time now, and the Tartarus Pits were a thing of a past best forgotten.

      Domi watched from her position by the door, checking the street again to see if any more locals were waiting for their services. The strange group of six was gone, departed amid the labyrinthine alleyways that made up the shantytown. In fact, the streets seemed suddenly clear, a much-appreciated lull in the stream of locals needing help. “Why don’t you go for a walk?” she suggested to Edwards. “Clear your head. Me and the Hen can man the fort for a while.”

      Edwards nodded lethargically, his head still sore, before brushing past Domi and off into the street of dust. “Thanks, doll, you’re an angel.”

      Domi shook her head. “Don’t ever call me that,” she told him with semiseriousness, recalling a rather unpleasant incident in Russia where she really had been mistaken for an angel.

      As Edwards ambled off down the street, Henny arched one blond eyebrow as Domi came over to join her. “‘The Hen’?” she asked.

      Domi shrugged. “Rule of the Outlands. Adapt and survive.”

      GRANT FOUND CLEM BRYANT in the Cerberus cafeteria. The chef was busily deep-frying some chicken in batter, while other personnel rushed back and forth, dressed in white with their hair held back in nets.

      “Looks fattening,” Grant observed as he approached Clem at the deep-fat fryer.

      Clem glanced at him and smiled, a mischievous twinkle in his blue eyes. “But fattening is tasty,” he said, “and we all deserve a treat once in a while.” Clem was a tall man in his late thirties, with dark hair that swept back from his high forehead, and a trim goatee beard on his chin. An oceanographer by education, Clem was one of the Manitius Moon base freezies who had awoken to a world two hundred years after he had been placed in cryogenic stasis. With little need for his skills in a mountain redoubt, Clem had turned his attention to the culinary arts and found himself quite skillful at cooking, soon taking a permanent position with the facility’s cafeteria staff. Besides being an oceanographer and a chef, Clem was a quiet but personable individual, who enjoyed his own company and revelled in the completion of a puzzle, be it filling in a Sudoku number grid or finding a challenging cryptic crossword among the vast archives of the Cerberus facility. In short, Clem was an obsessive thinker whose mind regularly deconstructed problems to view them from an alternate perspective. “So, how may I help you, Grant?” he asked in his treacle-rich voice.

      Grant held up the clear plastic bag he carried. “I want you to take a look at these,” he explained, unzipping the top of the bag.

      Grant held open the mouth of the bag and Clem peered inside, seeing the mollusks resting there in their glistening shells. “Would you like me to cook them?” he queried.

      “No.” Grant laughed. “I want you to identify them. You’re the ocean guy, right?”

      Bryant nodded before reaching for the handle of his fryer and shaking the sizzling contents. “Oh, yes, I’m the ocean guy,” he agreed. “Why don’t you find yourself a table while I finish up here, and I’ll join you outside in five minutes.”

      “I’ll go snag a coffee,” Grant said and he made his way from the kitchen area with the little bag clutched in his grip.

      A few minutes later, sans hairnet, Clem walked over to the plastic-covered table where Grant was blowing on a steaming cup of java.

      The cafeteria was a large room filled with long, fold-down tables that stretched to seat a dozen people on each side. The tables were covered in a wipe-dry plastic coating. The walls were painted in warm colors, and a line of horizontal, slit windows ran close to the ceiling along the length of the wall farthest from the double door entrance. Because of the size of the room and the amount of available seating, it occasionally doubled for a conference area when something important needed to be announced to all staff, since it lacked the austerity of a more formal venue, which was something Lakesh preferred to avoid. Right now, however, the cafeteria was almost entirely deserted, with just a few personnel sitting finishing a late lunch or enjoying a relaxing drink while they took a well-earned break from their shift. As ever, the room had that scent of all cafeterias the world over, the indefinable musk of warm foods served at strange hours for hungry personnel.

      “Well, then,” Clem began in his warm, friendly voice as he took the seat opposite Grant, “let’s take a look at what you have there, shall we?”

      Grant tipped the bag upside down and carefully laid the six dead crustaceans on the table between them.

      Clem reached for the largest of them, then retracted his hand, clearly thinking better of it. “Are they dead?” he asked.

      “Oh, yes,” Grant assured him. “We couldn’t find any live ones. Believe me, we looked.”

      Fascinated, Clem took the largest of the mollusks—roughly circular and about seven inches in diameter—and held it up to his eyes, turning it over and over in the light. “Where did they come from?” he asked, still gazing at the coruscating patterns on the strange creature’s oil-like shell. The light seemed to waver across its surface, as if seen through a heat haze, and Clem was already speculating that it in fact had a double shell, the dark one below the clear surface shell that created the slightly disarming optical effect.