The Trilisk Supersedure (9 page)

“Without
Magnus?”

“We’re
both armed,” Telisa said. “And we have the scouts, at least the ones close by
that can still hear us.”

“When
he gets back, if he finds us missing…”

“I’ll
leave a message here with the cargo containers. They can transfer it to his
link when he gets within range. Besides, I bet Shiny’s all over this jamming
problem.”

“He’s
certainly very capable. I’m still wrapping my head around having a giant
centipede monster on my team.”

“He’s
not a monster. Remember that,” Telisa said.

Oops.
Did I say that out loud?
Cilreth frowned. The comment would have
slid by with Magnus, but Telisa was avidly behind Shiny and trusted him
completely.

Cilreth
checked the scouts. “Magnus took one scout with him. Let’s leave one to watch
the camp and take three with us?”

“Sounds
great,” Telisa said. “I’ll tell them not to wander far off. No use in losing
more. We might gain one or two as we move.”

They
both drew their stunners as they moved out. Telisa caught sight of Cilreth’s
stunner and stopped.

“Hrm.
Where are the weapons cases?” Telisa asked herself aloud.

Funny
how people can be perfectly comfortable in a link conversation; then they speak
to themselves out loud.
Cilreth did the same thing sometimes. She
thought maybe the habit formed when people were alone. They wanted to hear a
voice, so they chatted to themselves aloud. So now she sometimes talked to
herself inside her head, sometimes through her link, and sometimes out loud.

Telisa
turned back. Cilreth didn’t answer the question because she knew Telisa could
use her link to ask the cases for anything she wanted.

Or has
the jamming gotten worse?

As a
test, Cilreth queried the inventory service of a nearby case. It sent queries
out to the other cases and found the weapons containers for her. Telisa was
already opening one of them. Cilreth scanned the nearby stalks for any signs of
danger.

Telisa
came back with a smart pistol in her hand. Cilreth had familiarized herself
with the projectile weapons, though she preferred the stunner as a safer
alternative. The weapon had a few smart rounds in it, capable of locking onto
any target the user specified. The smart rounds could turn away or
self-destruct in flight if they neared something that didn’t fit the target
profile. However, on an alien planet, one would likely forego any target
profiles since it was impossible to tell exactly what kind of dangerous animal
you might come across.

Cilreth’s
link told her Telisa had put negative signatures into the weapon for the three
Terrans, so it would be difficult (though not impossible) to accidentally shoot
a friend.

“Better
if we have radically different weapons by default,” Telisa said. “In case
something we find is immune to either one.”

Cilreth
nodded. She figured as much. Between the two of them and the scouts, they had a
variety of weapons. She noticed the pistol had a new accessory attached to its
underside.

“What’s
the new device?”

Telisa’s
eyebrows rose in a question; then she deduced what Cilreth was asking about.

“Oh.
Under the barrel? It’s a one-shot glue grenade.”

“Nice.
I’m not quite used to all the weapons yet. From private investigator to
planetary explorer, you know.”

“Isn’t
it wonderful?” Telisa asked enthusiastically.

Cilreth
chuckled.
So young and full of energy.
“Which way are we going?”

Telisa
was silent for a moment; then a scout robot headed out. “Follow him,” she said.

They
followed the robot out of the clearing. As they came to the first tight group
of alien plants, Cilreth automatically reached for her machete.

“Shall
I cut a swath through? Or do we want a low-profile trail behind us?”

“If
there were no people, I’d say go ahead and cut. Predators will be equipped to
find us anyway. But with people we don’t know in the ruins, let’s leave it.”

Cilreth
nodded. She agreed with the thinking. If she left a trail, it would make it
easier for Magnus to follow if he needed to find them but also easier for
strangers to find them.

“We
have a box of breadcrumb devices we could use,” Cilreth pointed out.

“Oh
yeah. I never quite saw the usefulness of the devices before.”

“They
are usually just for marking a complex path for others to follow later after
you’re gone. Some places screw with a link’s ability to accurately map them,
and sometimes there isn’t a way to send your map to the next person to come
along.”

“And we
can configure them to be silent when strangers come by,” Telisa noted. She was
probably reading up on them in her link to remind herself of their
capabilities.

“But in
this case, I’m wondering if we can form a bridge with them. If they can each
reach twenty five meters or so, then we could daisy chain our communications
back here.”

“Daisy
chain?” There was a delay. Then Telisa nodded. “Okay. But I hope we stop coming
up with new plans every five minutes, or we’ll never get anything done!”

Young
people. Every time I use an archaic term they have to look it up.
“Ha.”
Cilreth ran back and retrieved a pack of fifty breadcrumbs. Each device was a
small black cylinder, the size of five or six tiny coins stacked together. She
configured them as a relay chain and told them to only offer services to the
three Terrans or Shiny. Then she jogged back to Telisa and dropped the first
one at the entrance of the plant cluster.

“There
we go,” Cilreth said.

Telisa pushed
aside the green masses of moss-like leaves and stepped through. Her spheres
slipped through after her, dodging around swaying green mops and thick stalks.
Cilreth followed.

They
had walked about a hundred meters from camp when the scout stopped. Cilreth
immediately stopped with it, staring ahead. She had just dropped a third
breadcrumb device behind her. She accessed the scout’s view. Its Vovokan mass
detectors had sensed movement ahead, over and above the normal flutter of the
green plant bulbs in a light breeze. She checked the mass map. The movement was
fifteen meters ahead, and slightly underground.

A trap?
Thank Cthulhu for those scout machines.

“There,”
Telisa said through her link, sending Cilreth a visual indicator. Telisa
pointed out a hole in the ground under a batch of stalks. One of the natural
plant pot wells. Cilreth was able to confirm the movement came from inside the
well.

Cilreth
stayed put and watched. Nothing much seemed to be happening on the surface. She
watched until she thought maybe Telisa would just keep going. Then she spotted
something moving. This time she was ready to interpret what she saw: another
translucent creature.

It was
small. Then she saw another. More tiny clear creatures climbed out from the
plant well. They scampered over the spiky red rock.

“Critters.
Just some clear critters, like ghost shrimp,” Cilreth transmitted. For some
reason they reminded her of ghost shrimp in size and movement, though she could
not tell if they had legs or not.

“The
last small critters I found tried to eat me alive,” Telisa said. She had her
pistol pointed in their direction. Cilreth knew the grenade launcher was
probably being armed to the signature of those clear creatures.

“You’re
not going to shoot first, are you?” she asked a bit nervously.

“No
way,” Telisa said. “I’m not looking for trouble. Let’s just skirt around.” But
she did not move.

“Watch
the plants for the red snake things, too,” Cilreth said. “Where there’s prey…”

“Good
point,” Telisa agreed. She lowered her pistol.

Cilreth
spotted one of the creatures pulling a piece of plant along the rock. Then it
fell back into the black hole of the well carrying the debris.

“They’re
carrying stuff that fell into the plant well,” Cilreth pointed out. “That’s why
there’s no detritus lying around. They carry it in there, and it must be for
food.”

“Or to
grow food with,” Telisa added.

“You
don’t think…they couldn’t be intelligent, could they?”

“I
doubt it,” Telisa said slowly.

“It’s
just that they could fit through the grilles.”

Telisa
stopped. She had to be thinking about it. “Yeah, but why are they living in a
hole in the ground when they could live in the buildings?”

“Hrm.
Yeah. I’m sure they’re not smart. Just trying not to make any assumptions.”

They
sped up as the clear colony of harvesters was left in the rear. Cilreth kept
placing the trail-marking devices as they went. Within another ten minutes,
their scout leader arrived at a cluster of Konuan buildings.

Cilreth
pinged their camp through the chain of breadcrumb devices. Everything appeared
to be working. She took stock of the structures. They looked similar to what
they’d already seen, only taller and denser.

Cilreth
checked her link for Shiny and Magnus. She still couldn’t get any response,
even through the chain back to camp.

“Any
reason you like these?” she asked Telisa, referring to the buildings.

“Yes.
They’re situated over a system of underground chambers and tunnels. It kinda
reminds me of what we found on Thespera. I’m hoping the tunnels below were used
or built by Trilisks.”

Telisa
selected one of the five grilles that dotted their side of the nearest
building. A scout started to pick away at the setting around the grille. Telisa
made a frustrated sound. Cilreth took a look. She thought it might take the
scout about ten minutes to dig into the building.

“I’m
going to send a scout to our ship. Shiny gave me some kind of digging device; I
still have it around,” Telisa said. “I don’t think it’s at the camp.”

“Really?
Were the walls made of tough stone on Vovok?” asked Cilreth.

“I’m
not sure how hard they were. Besides, it was the Trilisk trap. Thespera, not
Vovok. But the item is workable enough.”

“That
would be cool. These bars are rugged, though. They were built to last.
Impressive for a primitive race, actually.”

“Well,
even if it doesn’t work on the grilles, the robots get through eventually.”

“I
assume the walls are usually even stronger.”

“Maybe.
I could think of a reason why not, though. If the Konuan used them to keep
predators out of their dwellings, then it would be enough to look like this was
the only hole through. The predator might try to dig there. Especially if it
saw or smelled a Konuan flit through there. But the predator might not try to
break through what looks like a rocky mountainside.”

Cilreth
shrugged. “Fair enough. Whatever works for us to get around. Otherwise, I’m
gonna get a pickaxe and end up with arms like Jaggor.”

“Who?”

“Oh.
Never mind. I’m showing my age.”

Telisa
nodded. If her link hadn’t been jammed, it might have told her about the old VR
called
Jaggor the Hunter-Gatherer.
The daisy chain reference was
probably in her dictionary cache. The information was most likely available in
the huge data cache of the
Clacker
orbiting above. Cilreth was just as
happy to leave the reference unexplained.

Finally
the scout shifted the loosened grill in the wall. Telisa and Cilreth stepped
forward and helped to break it free. Then Telisa took her pistol out again and
sent a scout in.

The
machine’s lights gave them a preview of the room. It looked similar to the ones
they had already seen, though more cluttered. Rusted metal implements hung from
racks on four walls.

“An old
armory? Those could be weapons,” Cilreth said.

“Hrm.
Maybe,” Telisa said. “If a blob of protoplasm can hold a sword. They fit
through the grilles, of course. You know what? It must have been hard to carry
anything large around in those dwellings.”

“Oh
yeah, major limitation. That shows how important those grilles are to them. If
your theory about predators is the explanation, there must have been a constant
threat from them.”

“Yet
the Trilisks come here and add the tunnels below. We need to figure out why the
Trilisks came here. What are they doing on these planets? Research on alien
life? Conquest?”

Cilreth
smiled.
It would be nice to know, but they’re gone now. I’m more interested
in their toys and how they can improve our lives.
“So how many more grilles
to get to the nearest tunnel?”

“Probably
four or five more,” Telisa said.

“If the
grilles are for predators, you’d expect them to be sufficient on outside-facing
entrances only.”

Telisa
turned back toward the entrance. “Ah. The scout has come back.” Cilreth
followed her gaze. Another scout scrambled into the room. Telisa plucked a tool
from its back.