The Trilisk Supersedure (19 page)

Okay,
well, that rifle isn’t current.

“Ex
UED?” she asked quickly, hoping against hope. If he was a remnant of another
unit, the out-of-date rifle would make sense. Maybe he’d had to scavenge.

“Space
force, actually,” he admitted slowly. “Though I’m no longer a soldier. And to
be frank, no longer a friend of the world government.”

Everyone
still called it the
world government
, even though there were many more
than one Terran-controlled world now. The words were old enough to take on
meaning of their own. Politically, it was still the only world that really
mattered. Other planets had large populations and healthy industries, some of
which had risen up against Earth, but they hadn’t been able to resist the UNSF.

Arakaki
waited for hatred to come. But she only felt sad as she chomped on the tough
bit of synthetic in her teeth. Of course he wasn’t UED. Not in that huge new
ship.

“That’s
a big ship you guys brought. Is it full of scientists or soldiers? Or both?”

“It’s
an alien ship, and we’re here to find Trilisk artifacts,” he said, deadpan.

Buckle
bulb? No, dammit. He has to be telling the truth.

Before
she could answer, he continued, “I know it’s crazy, but right now we have the
Konuan to worry about. You look like you can handle yourself. Stay if you want,
but I’m blowing that thing to bits.”

Arakaki’s
link added a monitoring service hosted on his link. “A hack? Why should I let
you try?”

“It’s
the data feed from the robots I have in and around the building,” he said.

Arakaki
accessed the service. She saw the positions of six machines. Four waited at
grilles near the entrances to the building, and two others were on a lower
floor, centrally located. There was something odd about their sensor maps. They
had an extra layer to the display labeled “mass map.” Some kind of fancy new
mass sensor suite?

He sure
is trusting me quickly. Stupid bugger.

“Cross
me if you want,” he said, as if reading her mind. “Do it after it’s dead. You
must have known someone it killed. I’m a human like you, it’s not even close.
We get it first, okay?”

Arakaki
nodded. “I’ll add you to my grenade signature blacklist.”

“Same
here,” he said. “I recognize that PAW. What’s that there? Laser?”

“Yes. I
don’t even know what hurts the thing. But it’s killed plenty of men with PAWs.”

They
listened for a minute, watching the feeds. Magnus knelt with his back against a
column that ran from one side of the floor vent to the ceiling vent. Arakaki
did the same, facing another direction.

“These
buildings are tricky,” Arakaki said. “You can see through half the building in
any direction through these grilles, yet any room could have an ambusher
waiting in a corner out of sight.”

“I have
to search. I lost a friend,” Magnus said. She could hear it was true. “She’s
tough. Got a lot of tricks up her sleeve. There’s a chance she’s not dead. So I
have to go looking.”

“It’ll
kill you for sure,” Arakaki said. “It knows you want to find your friend. It’ll
wait for you.”

“Stay
here. Or help search. Up to you,” he said.

He’s
not going to abandon his friend. Stupid, yet admirable.
“Which
way first?”

“Crawl
through that vent. Then we head that way. We can cover each other a bit,” he
suggested.

“The
best we could hope for is one of us shoots the thing while it eats the head off
the other,” Arakaki said coldly.

“You’re
familiar with it, then,” Magnus said. “All I know is what you told me. It’s
fast, and a hit-and-run type of creature. Has tech. Good hearing. Likes to
attack the head.” The man’s Veer head guard came up across the back of his
head.

“It’s a
Konuan, like you said. They were nasty things, fast, thin, like umbrella-shaped
bats that can hang from the ceiling. When they open up, they can almost
completely cover you then snap back shut. Then digest you with acid spit or
venom.”

Arakaki
moved slowly. She didn’t plan to shoot Magnus, at least not yet, but he was
still watching her.

And
with good reason. I have two deadly weapons and I’m UED. But he wants his
friend and he knows I can help. Or die trying.

“Acid.
I guess that makes it easier to dine on any creature made of carbon, hydrogen,
and oxygen no matter what planet it’s from,” Magnus said.

“I
think it just does it to kill us. Look, I was serious when I said the best we
can hope for is for one of us to kill it when it kills the other one of us. I
suggest stay in sight of each other. If I point my weapon at you, just duck.”

Magnus
nodded. “Then I have an idea,” he said. “But I doubt you’ll like it much.”

***

Telisa
heard breathing. To her heightened hearing, the act involved a dozen vortices
of air, slurping past lips, tongue, and throat, and sliding around bronchial
tubes and the internal flexible sacs of human lungs. It was a complex, wet
sound.

It’s
Magnus. I can tell just by hearing him breathe. I’ve heard hints of this a
million times before: listening to him exercise, sleep, and make love. There is
so much more to his breathing now, but I can recognize it. I just know it’s
him, even from fifty meters away through these cramped cubes and ventways.
Amazing!

Someone
else. Was it Cilreth? No. It didn’t seem right.

I can
hear her. I know it’s a woman. But I can’t picture it as Cilreth. Too…small,
too compact. Too strong. Cilreth is taller, older, slower.

Telisa
was amazed at how rich an information source her hearing could be. So many
details beyond what human hearing could deliver to her. She could tell how
large the Terrans were, and she could hear the echoes of their movements all
around, telling her where the rooms and the grilles were. The building seemed
like so much more now…in fact, she realized part of its design was about
carrying sound through the building by lining up the grilles in each direction.
Crawling to the middle of the room let you know what was happening in the
entire area, but moving off to a corner made it milder, more distant. She moved
to the center of the room and listened more.

Telisa
heard the scraping of tiny claws across stone.

It’s
the other one! Here in this building. Maybe Magnus can kill it! But he wants to
kill me, too.

“It’s
in this building,” she heard Magnus say. His voice resonated with a hundred
details Telisa had never heard before.

“Yes,”
the female voice replied. “I have a mobile sensor suite parked outside. But don’t
think we’ve trapped it here. It’s just playing with us.”

“Here
we go,” Magnus said. Then he stopped breathing.

Here we
go? Go where? What happened?

Telisa
only heard the noises of the woman’s movement. She prepared the tool she had to
pry out the next vent. Telisa tensed. That tool was unpleasantly abrupt and
noisy. She shuffled toward the nearest corner. Still there was no sign of
Magnus, as if he had disappeared.

Of
course. He turned on the stealth sphere. He’s still there. She’s the bait.

The thunderclap
came and went. Telisa felt relief it was over.

If they
shoot their weapons, that sound might hurt, too. Five Entities! A stunner is a
sonic weapon. It would be unbelievably loud to me.

The
instant Telisa realized a stunner would be formidable to a Konuan, she knew
what she wanted to do.

I have
to tell Magnus a stunner might incapacitate a Konuan. Might incapacitate me.

The
awful sound of the grille breaker snapped through the building. Telisa ignored
it. She moved out onto the wall two meters above the floor.

She
moved her legs carefully, scraping the wall for long moments, though she worked
as fast as she could.

The
other will hear me clearly. Is the other my enemy right now? Will it seek me
out?

She
heard the scraping again. It was moving around the far side of them. Coming at
them from behind, through the doors they had forced open.

No!
Magnus, look out!

Telisa
felt the thrill of the Konuan danger response: nervous legs, razor-sharp
hearing, and a chemical stimulant released from a thousand tiny pouches under
her outer integument. She could feel her skin tightening.

Without
my link how can I warn him? He thinks we’re both dangerous! But he’s on my
trail. That’s exactly what the other Konuan wants. It will kill him.

Chapter 18

Cilreth
stared at the pillars. All three opened at her command, but none seemed to hold
Telisa inside. There was only the pile of green remains she thought must be a
dead Trilisk.

Trilisk
devices can hear and understand my thoughts. Not through my link. Just by an
unobtrusive scan. I wonder how it is I have permission to use anything.

She
stood in the center of the room, stymied. “I need a list of services,” she
thought aloud. “Possibilities.” Her gaze fell on the green thing in the tube.
She had been avoiding it, so unpleasant was its appearance and meaning. It was
even uglier than the giant lobster thing that had tried to kill her.

If that’s
a Trilisk body, then maybe it has a Trilisk link in it.

She
walked over to the tube. She thought about how amazing a Trilisk link must be.
If she had one with her, if she could use it, maybe she could use Trilisk
machines from the ruins wherever she went. It could be a game-changer.

This is
crazy.

She
asked the inner tube to open. The clear material slid away just as the outer
shell of the column had. Cilreth watched with growing discomfort. She waited
for a bad smell. There was none. The fuzz-covered corpse sagged further as the
clear barrier slipped down into the floor. Cilreth dropped to her knees next to
it.

Then
she began to probe through the corpse. She took out anything from her pack that
might help her. A water locator and purifier. A poison detector. She looked at
the remains in several wavelengths through her laser scope. Nothing she had was
designed to look through an alien body. She found a medical device in her pack.
One of the things it could do was locate foreign objects lodged in a Terran
body. She tried it on the corpse. It showed a hundred things inside the body it
thought were problems: everything from shrapnel to parasites.

Okay,
that thing is obviously whacked out since it’s not looking into a human.

“Nothing
left but to dig in,” she said to herself. She held an eating fork and knife and
stared down at the pile. “Ugh. Ugh. I can’t do this,” she said out loud.

She
thought again about the link. If she dug through a human body, it would take a
while, but she would eventually find the link. Would the same hold for this
alien corpse?

Trilisks
were so advanced they probably didn’t need links. If they had them, they might
have been the size of a single cell. Or all their machines read their minds,
just like my link does with me, from the outside. And plants thoughts and
information right back into the brain without any device?

Cilreth
sneezed.

“Great,
now I have some awful space disease,” she said, not really believing it. She
looked at the pile of green fuzz again. “But what if you went on a trip? You
didn’t have a link to bring with you? Internal helpers, protectors, power
sources?”

Cilreth
closed her eyes.
Where is the link? Where is the link?

She
opened her eyes. The display across the room had changed. It showed a
three-armed, three-legged creature. Like the robot they had found, it was deep
blue, almost crystalline. She saw subtle differences. This body was a bit
rounder, softer. The body became transparent. Within the volume of the body,
complex lines began to form. They crisscrossed the body space like a nervous
system. Several spots around the body pulsed with more light. Some of them
expanded as she looked at them, close-ups of more complicated webs within.

“The
entire body is integrated like a link. Or at least the entire nervous system,”
she said slowly. “So there’s my answer.”

Cilreth
dug a sample cylinder out of her pack. She looked down at the remains and
scooped some into the container. Then she threw it back out. She looked at the
display and concentrated on one of the most complex areas. It magnified to show
more detail.

“Where?
Where is that part here?”

She
looked down. Part of the body glowed. She could see through it.

Cilreth
reached down and carefully scooped up her sample to include the parts
displayed.

“Gruesome,
but effective,” she said to herself. “I have something here. Something I hope
isn’t too scrambled to be analyzed.”