The Trilisk Supersedure

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.”

Cilreth scanned the room again. She didn’t see any threats, but she realized she had not been paying enough attention to notice. The Vovokan spheres were watching her, at least. They rotated lazily around the tube she had dug in.

“Where’s Telisa?” she asked again.

The other column displayed the flat creature. Cilreth felt only frustration. She took a deep breath and approached the display.

“No. This. I want her,” she thought, bringing up the image of Telisa in her mind. “Where?”

A pane opened in her PV. The routing protocol was accessed and a route entered into her link. Cilreth accessed the map. There was a display of more tunnels she had not been in yet. And a red line marked a path through them.

“She’s there?” Cilreth asked. Nothing happened. “Then that’s where I need to be,” she said. Cilreth opened her eyes. The display before her showed a Terran brain again.

The brain was utterly dark. Devoid of all activity.

Oh no. She isn’t dead, is she?

Cilreth stuffed the sample tube in her pack and hefted her laser rifle. She followed the map out a tunnel across from where she had entered.