The Trilisk AI (23 page)

“No.
Let’s take the storage and get out of here in case the Space Force team got
that emergency override notification. Cilreth might need us, too.”

***

Back
at the
Vandivier
, Cilreth became visible at the top of the cargo ramp to
greet Arlin and Relachik.

“You’re
back in one piece, I see,” Arlin said.

“Mission
accomplished,” she said. “And I’m telling you straight: I’ve never been more
terrified of the UNSF in my life.”

Relachik
nodded. “All nice and clean when you got there?”

“Yes.
Whatever that Avatar thing was, it got in there and did a number on those
guys.”

“It
didn’t go inside.”

“Sure
it did! Every gate, every security mount, all gone, everyone knocked out. I
mean, it could have knocked them out with gas or something, but there were
laser emplacements missing from corridors—”

“It
never went inside. The Avatar just flew over in orbit. No doubt it’s already
left the system on its way to the next mission.”

Cilreth
started to reply, but when she saw the serious look on Relachik’s face, nothing
came out. Arlin traded looks with her.

“They
carted away the criminals like so much meat,” she said, but her voice was
quieter.

Relachik
smiled. “Excellent work. Keep in mind, the UNSF is what’s standing between you
and the aliens. Here, Arlin and I got some more of their storage that may help.
These are complete: storage and network modules, the full units.”

“Really?
Where from?”

“We
found a supply shed outside the perimeter. You never know, these may have
something. Just add them to the ones you got and analyze all of them
carefully.”

Cilreth
noticed a bonus drop into her company account. Relachik had been very generous.

Damn
well ought to be for sneaking around out there with no backup.

Chapter 17

Magnus
breathed loudly beside Telisa as they walked down a glittering cave tunnel. She
looked at him repeatedly, though she knew better than to ask about his
condition yet again. She had already started to get on his nerves with her
attention, but his stubborn refusal to confess to his pain wasn’t team player
behavior.

If
he’s compromised, he should share that with me, to protect both of us.

As
if reading her mind, he spoke up. “My stomach hurts, but I’ve taken a
painkiller and a stomach-settling agent. I should be at about eighty percent.”

“Got
it,” she said. “The good news is, we’re almost there. Very close. There’s an
unusual area ahead on the map. At the center, there’s a special structure, a
kind of vault, holding the seed.”

“A
vault? Interesting. I didn’t envision an industrial seed being held in a vault.
It must not have been active at the time. Maybe it’s a backup of some kind?”

“Your
guess is as good as mine. If we could talk to Shiny while we’re down here...”

“Then
we’d risk more destroyer attention. Our own communications equipment could do it,
though. We’d need some relays planted in the right spots.”

“He
already talked to us once. I don’t see how it could be such a big risk.”

Magnus
shrugged. “The destroyers may pay special attention to transmissions to and
from the surface. I don’t know. He knows better than either of us I suspect.
He’s been watching them with those probes. I bet he’s learned a lot.”

The
tunnel widened. Telisa saw a vast chamber ahead. Some kind of passive lighting
system still gave off a dull glow in a few areas, making the place look
surreal, like a rendition of an eerie landscape under a full moon. They took a
couple of steps into the room. Magnus and Telisa swept their lights around.

Telisa
checked Scout’s feed. The machine was somewhere slightly above them. Telisa
aimed her light higher. A sort of balcony went around the entire room, allowing
access from the level above them.

In
the center was the vault. Magnus kept his light pointed toward it. The vault
was a huge, segmented object the size of a small house. Its curved surface
looked like someone had taken a giant Viking boat, turned it upside down, and
painted it silver.

Telisa
swept her light along the ground, looking for the critters. Her light settled
on a burn mark on the sandy floor. Fragments of metal or ceramic lay all about
the mark.

“What
is this?” Magnus wondered aloud.

“My
guess is a robot was blasted here. By a destroyer.”

“A
robot or a cyborg.”

Telisa’s
eyes looked over the rest of the platform. “There’s another over there,” she
pointed.

“And
Scout’s vision above shows a couple more. There was a fight here. I hope—”

“The
industrial seed is still here? Me too. But the destroyers just came to kill
everything, right? Not to steal things? Damn.”

“Could
someone else have made it here first?” he asked.

“How
many other Vovokans are likely to be out there conning aliens into coming back
down and grabbing stuff? Don’t answer that. Let’s just get in and take the
seed.”

They
walked to their right toward a ramp at one end of the vault. It sat on a
platform about a meter above the floor they walked on. Magnus ascended the ramp
first. He idly kicked away some debris.

“Those
pieces are...they look odd. They don’t remind me of Vovokan technology. I think
maybe there was a fight and some destroyers died here.”

Telisa
joined him at the top of the ramp. The smooth hull of the vault ended abruptly
before them. There was obviously some kind of door, a wide, low rectangle on
the end, but it had no visible means of ingress. Three spheres rested at the
base of the door. Telisa recognized them as the colorful spheres that led them
here.

“I
hope you know how to get in there,” Magnus said.

“The
map he gave us has an annotation on how to open it.”

“Ah.
I knew Shiny wouldn’t forget such an obvious detail.”

Telisa’s
mood dropped sharply as she read on. “It says we have to...it shows what legs
we have to raise to open it. Magnus, it involves over eighteen legs in a
sequence of five moves. In the space of less than a second!”

“Unbelievable.
Don’t panic. We can figure it out. We could create our own sound file.”

“No.
Vovokans are deaf, remember? They watch the legs move. That’s how they talk.
What are the chances the vault sensor uses sound instead of visual input to
check the password?”

“We
can wait until he contacts us again,” Magnus offered.
No. That’s reaching.

“Tell
me this isn’t happening,” Telisa said. She looked over the vault on the map
again and again. She looked for more metadata attached to the map. There was a
section on the vault.

“Oh,
thank the Entities,” Telisa said. “We have a digital access code.”

“There
you go. We got all upset for nothing.”

“Not
so fast. Our links can’t talk to the vault,” Telisa said.

“Shiny’s
probe here can talk to anything Vovokan,” Magnus pointed out. “Send me the
code. I can pass it along.”

Telisa
laughed. “Yes! I can’t believe it. For a minute there I was imagining us
hopping around like crazy people trying to speak with our limbs like a Vovokan.
And even with Scout’s eight legs, we’d be short a couple dozen. Of course, the
vault probably wouldn’t accept the code from anything but a Vovokan anyway.”

Magnus
smiled. Telisa passed him the code and the door slid open a moment later.

The
inside lit up. Telisa walked in onto a smooth, clean metal floor. The vault
wasn’t full; Telisa saw the far side of the vault was empty.
No sand. So
sometimes they forego the sandy floor. Why here?

The
left-hand wall was obscured by ten or fifteen stacked cubes over a meter long
on each edge. Their sides had tiny rails with a bunch of small holes. Telisa
imagined a Vovokan picking up the cube: several of its arms went on each side
and its tiny stubby fingers fit into the holes.

On
the right, a set of gray shelves held a collection of items.

“Five
Holies,” Telisa breathed. “Look at those...” she wandered over, mesmerized by
the items.
These have to be valuable to Shiny to be in the vault. They must
all be useful.

Telisa
examined a cone-shaped spiral of metal with three small rods emerging from the
top. She had no idea what it could be. The next item was a deep green
rectangle. Its exterior was smooth except for three buttons on the front. She
wondered if it was actually only a carrying case for the real item.
And
they’re not all Vovokan in origin. These over here are too different.

“Yes!
Shiny and I share a passion,” she said.

“How’s
that?” Magnus asked, his voice skeptical.

“He
likes alien things, too. These aren’t all Vovokan, I’d bet on it.”

Another
item caught her eye. Everything on the shelves looked shiny and new except for
this piece. It was a black bowl. It looked like it had a miniature turbofan
over the top opening. The surface was chipped, crusted.
It must be ancient.
Amazing. Shiny is nothing if not practical. I doubt it’s just for show. It
almost has to be functional. Okay, maybe it is. He might keep it if it were
somehow an investment.

“Parker
Interstellar Travels to Telisa Relachik. Telisa Relachik, come in, over?”
Magnus said. She ripped her eyes from the trove.

“Magnus,
these are—these are all amazing. They could be priceless! Shiny obviously
thought they were valuable, too. No doubt these are. And he said we could take
anything we want!”

“Whoa,
whoa, calm down, please. How are we going to carry them all the way up?”

“Scout
could carry one. Maybe two, maybe three,” Telisa said absentmindedly. Her eyes
danced over the items again. She saw something that looked vaguely like a
projectile weapon. It had a central hollow shaft ending in two handles placed
sixty degrees apart on the left and right sides.

“And
the seed? No doubt that information says what it looks like?”

Telisa
forced herself to glance back at the other wall. The cube farthest from the
entrance was obviously different. It held a blue sphere of a diameter slightly
less than the cube’s edge, making it look like the sphere had partially melted
into the cube.

“That’s
it over there,” Telisa said. She turned back to look at the items before her.

“Maybe
you could take a look at it too, at some point. Tell me what you think. It
looks a bit heavy.”

Telisa
tore her attention away from the shelves and walked over to the device they
thought was the seed. She looked over the odd cube-sphere fusion.

“Yes,
this is what Shiny wants,” she said, double-checking through the map module
Shiny had given her. At least we found it. Now we need a plan to move it. It
has a power source. I think the destroyers would notice it.”

Magnus
nodded. His brows came together as he contemplated the problem.

“I
can’t believe I have all this stuff and we’re basically stuck down here,”
Telisa said. “How can we get out?”

“Let’s
look at all our choices,” Magnus said. “We could destroy all the local invader
machines. That option seems impossible on the surface of it. Or we could
distract them and move the container while they’re out of range. What other
options do we have?”

“Somehow
cloak the container. Or disguise it. If we could disguise it as human
technology, they wouldn’t care about it.”

“How?”

“I
don’t know. Just brainstorming ideas at this point.”

“I
wonder why he didn’t just have us power it down somehow. We could look into how
to do that. What else?” asked Magnus.

“Clear
a shaft out of the planet. Put the container on a rocket, and shoot it out so
fast the destroyer machines can’t stop it.”

“Wow,
that’s an interesting idea,” Magnus said. “But they just fought a war. Most
likely they have ways of stopping a missile.”

“Yes.
Yes, of course. How about the distraction?”

“Maybe
our invisible friends can help us with that one.”

“We
don’t know how to talk to them,” Telisa pointed out. “And the last of the
spheres died outside the vault, I think.”

“It’s
going to have to be a pretty damn big distraction.”

“We
can do it.”

“What’s
your idea?”

“The
power grid. We could reactivate parts of it just like Shiny did.”

“Ah,
yes,” Magnus said. “And when thousands of powered-down Vovokan machines come
back online, we have our distraction. Not bad, but the downside is, a minute
later we’ll have destroyers shooting the crap out of everything that moves. The
entire house could collapse on us.”