The Trilisk Supersedure (10 page)

The
device was a long stack of red cubes held in a silver frame. One end was broad
and flat.

“That
thing looks so weird! I guess given how odd Shiny looks, I shouldn’t be
surprised his tools look radical, too.”

Telisa
pointed the flat end of the machine at the wall beside a grille and activated
it. It made a gentle humming noise. Cilreth felt air moving through the room. “Whoa.”
She looked around.

“It’s
this thing,” Telisa said. “Sorry, I should have mentioned it makes a whirring
sound and the air moves around a lot when I use it.”

Telisa
started again. Cilreth watched the stone around the side of the grille
disappear. Then she saw a pile of gray liquid forming under the device.

“Yech,”
she said. “It’s digging so fast!”

Telisa
smiled. “We need one of these on every scout,” she said. “Magnus will be happy.
I bet Shiny can make us more of these.”

“If we
can get a hold of him again. I know, he’s probably working on it.”

The
grille was removed in record time. A scout machine slipped into the next room.
Bright reflections of silvery metal shone in the machine’s lights.

“Wow,
something interesting in there,” Telisa said.

Cilreth
took a peek. She thought it looked like a giant spider’s web of silver fibers. “Is
it safe?”

“What
makes you ask now?”

If I
say it looks like a spider web, it’ll sound dumb.
“Sorry,
just an instinctual reaction to what looks like a giant spider web. But maybe
we should know what’s up before going in there?”

Telisa
didn’t say anything. But she walked a second scout machine in and had it look
around with the other one.

“The
web things are modular,” Telisa noted. “Each one is a network of filaments,
roughly two meters square, with twelve little silver discs woven into it.”

Cilreth
watched the scout machine feeds as one of the scouts touched a web with the tip
of a leg. Nothing seemed to happen. The network was bright like new, but it
wasn’t sticky. Nothing moved.

“Okay,
I’m heading in there. I’d like to take one of these back for further study,”
she said.

Telisa
went in and started to collect one of the webs. Cilreth knelt down and waddled
through after her.

Cilreth
got a closer look at the room. Each shiny webbing had been made from filaments
of silver metal. Dispersed along the web every ten centimeters or so, thick
discs the size of a palm were woven into the network. The webs hung from old metal
hangers built into the walls and ceiling. A few lay on the floor.

“They’ve
been arranged in here,” Cilreth said. “It’s just a storage room.”

“Seems
like it, doesn’t it? The webs could easily fit through the grilles, so they
weren’t necessarily made in here.” Telisa finished folding it up and put it
into a black sample bag.

“I don’t
have a lot of theories about these things,” Cilreth said. “But next door there
were weapons. So I’m thinking these could be weapons, too.”

“One
thing is odd…these discs here are batteries. Advanced batteries. They’re beyond
anything we’ve seen in the Konuan ruins so far.”

“Trilisk,
then?” asked Cilreth.

“No.
Too primitive.”

“Then
maybe the outlying Konuan were primitive slaves to the high-tech city Konuan.”

“I’m
thinking the Trilisks were advancing them, showing them how to improve
themselves,” Telisa said.

“Really?
Interesting. I can easily pose a more sinister theory: the Trilisks took over,
and the few traitor Konuan who served them got cool toys to keep the other
Konuan in line.”

“You
are so cynical. It’s possible, though,” Telisa said.

Cynical
is my middle name.
“Didn’t you experience a Trilisk memory? I take
it you saw into the mind of one, and it was a nice creature? You felt it wanted
to help?”

“Well,
not really. It was angry at other aliens that had attacked its world at the
time and wanted revenge. Not exactly a loving moment. I think it was ruthless
to its enemies.”

“Well,
sounds like they may have been mean creatures,” Cilreth said.

“Maybe,
but like I said…the aliens had just killed a bunch of Trilisks, I think. I
would be angry, too. The memory is just at a bad moment for measuring their
overall disposition.”

I bet I
could tell if I had experienced it,
Cilreth thought.
If you
could be in someone else’s head for just thirty seconds, couldn’t you tell?

The
more Cilreth thought it over, the less certain she became of her initial
reaction. If you read the mind of a murderer when she was thinking about her
favorite restaurant, could you really pick up the killer vibe? Probably not.

They
checked the grilles in each direction, looking for something interesting.
Cilreth checked the grille on her left. A complicated shape lay in the
darkness.

“Over
here,” she said.

Telisa
lit the scene with her powerful flashlight. A scout added to the illumination
with its own lights.

“Whoa,
that’s no primitive anything,” Cilreth said.

The
shape was a robot. It had an upright, rocket-shaped body with a tripedal base.
Its three legs were staggered at sixty degrees from its three arms. The base of
the body rested against the floor. Its smooth sapphire exterior glittered in
the light. From beyond the grille the upright body looked thicker than a
Terran.

Almost
as an afterthought, Telisa broke out of her fascinated stare and grabbed the
breaker claw from her belt. Cilreth saw the move and followed her lead, drawing
her stunner. Then she frowned, replaced the stunner, and took out her machete.
Telisa gave her a questioning look. Cilreth shrugged.

“Maybe
it’s an alien death machine so advanced the designers never thought ‘what if
someone tries to hack its legs off?’” she said defensively. Then she asked, “What
kind of robot is it?”

“I’ve
never seen anything like it,” Telisa said. “But its trilateral symmetry
suggests…”

“Trilisks?”

Telisa
said nothing, as if uttering the possibility would nix her rising hopes.

“Three
legs, though?” Cilreth persisted. “How does it walk? Or, how
did
it
walk?”

“Well,
just look at them. They’re jointed funny.”

“Okay,
I guess nature can make almost anything work,” Cilreth said.

“Think
of the primitive Konuan. If they were around when this thing was operational,
they must have been terrified. It would have been like a rock god to them.”

“The
Trilisks may well have been here playing god,” Cilreth said. “Them and their
prayer machines, producing things out of thin air.”

Telisa
paused and opened her pack.

“What
do you need?” Cilreth asked.

“I’m
making sure we don’t have an active AI nearby that can produce things for us,”
Telisa said. She finished looking through her back. “No candy bars. Their
machines must be inoperative, like this robot.”

Cilreth
laughed. “We’re developing a checklist for exploration. Land on a new planet,
step one, see if prayer works.”

“Help
me get this thing onto a scout. I don’t want to be dragging it all the way
back.”

“Yes, I’m
sure we can, but they can barely fit in and out of here as it is. A scout will
have to drag it.”

Telisa
swore. “You’re right, of course. It must have come from below.” Telisa pointed
out a circular portal in the floor where the Konuan grille would usually lie.

Telisa
and Cilreth worked to attach the derelict machine to one of the scouts. Cilreth
wished she had one of the cargo case lids to use as a sled, but those were far
behind them. They finally decided an alien robot skin was probably durable
enough to survive dragging until they could make a sled from plant stalks
outside.

“Its
perfect blue surface is creepy. I feel like I’m looking into a lake when I
stare at it. What if it sucks the juice from the scout and comes back to life?”
Cilreth said.

“Shut
up,” Telisa said.

“What?
It’s not
that
crazy,” Cilreth said.

“I
know. You’re scaring the crap out of me,” Telisa said. “What choice do we have?
I want that robot.”

Cilreth
nodded.
I guess I’m being too cynical. Even for me.
“Should we send it
back now?”

Telisa
scratched her chin then nodded. “What good would it be in a fight now? Its
weapon mount is blocked.” She laughed. “How are we going to break that one to
Magnus? A definite design flaw. Scouts carrying cargo can’t really fight.”

Cilreth
smiled. “Room for improvement in version three. I think we have enough to head
back to the
Clacker
now.”

“Yes. I
just want to verify we’re over a Trilisk tunnel here.”

“This
robot isn’t enough?”

The
scout machine carrying the robot headed back. Then another scout attached a
smart line and dropped down the hole like a giant spider. Its sensory feed
showed a dusty tunnel below.

“It’s
something very different than this building. I want to take a quick peek,”
Telisa said.

Oh man.
We’ll never get back at this rate.

Telisa
dropped down and made an appreciative noise. Cilreth kept watching the views
from below through a scout robot.

“These
are much more advanced than the ruins above,” Cilreth said.

Telisa
just stared at the walls and a nearby column.

“Did
you hear me?” Cilreth asked over her link.

Telisa
turned to look up at Cilreth and spoke in an excited whisper. “Cilreth, I think
this area was constructed by the Trilisks just as Shiny suspected.”

“I—”
Cilreth began; then she heard a scrabbling sound behind her. “Something’s up
here!”

Chapter
8

Captain
Arakaki made her way along the ridge toward the tunnels where the settlers hid
themselves.

Of
course, she had been watching them for months. One of their sensor probes sat
on a nearby rocky cliff overlooking the ridge. Holtzclaw had interviewed them
back when they first arrived on the planet. He told Arakaki it was a sad
collection of men from some doomed expedition or settlement. He had told her
the survivors were so traumatized by being hunted by the Konuan that they had
started to worship it as some kind of god of death.

Arakaki
rolled her eyes as she recalled hearing about it.

My race
loves to escape reality through self-deception.

Holtzclaw
said the men lived simple lives, eating sugar from some photosynthesis modules
and the roots of a few Terran plants they managed to get growing. Arakaki knew
a lot about them, but there was one thing she didn’t know. Why had the Konuan
failed to kill the last few of them off? She intended to find out.

 Arakaki
idly chewed on a cigarette-sized strip of some tough synthetic. It was all that
was left of her ex—a man literally blown to bits—and though it seemed odd,
chewing on that surviving piece of his battle exoskeleton was her way of
remembering him. That, and she always had to be chomping on something anyway or
else she felt incomplete.

She saw
one of the trees on the ridge was shedding. Its thousands of component worms
were writhing along the red rocks, seeking other stalk holes. Every now and
then one of the trees just did that. Some UED scientist had said it was the end
of the life cycle: the tree dissolved into a thousand green worms that spread
its genetic material to other stalk plants among dozens of nearby fissures in
the rock. A week later the Konuan had killed him.

Some of
the worms might make it a hundred meters, though the little clear shrimp things
in the holes liked to scamper out and eat them. Arakaki thought it was all kind
of gross, but she had seen a lot worse, even in the food courts at Terran
starports.

She
stopped to take an extra look. Where the green crawlies migrated, there were
the shrimp-like feeders, which meant cleargliders. Did that also mean the event
might attract even bigger predators in turn? The vicinity looked clear to her
and her weapon’s sensors.

Finally
Arakaki ignored the green caterpillars and sidled up to the opening in the rock
where the settlers had been found. Her weapon detected signatures of four men
just inside the entrance. She paused, listening, then slipped inside.

One of
the men, bald, in a yellow robe, carefully cut up some kind of plant root.
Another, also in a yellow robe but with short, light-colored hair, worked on a handheld
device she didn’t recognize. The other two men looked similar, with reddish
robes. They sat on the floor with their eyes closed, either meditating or
accessing their PVs.