The Trilisk Supersedure

Chapter 7



A nearby scout alerted Cilreth of the approach of her teammates. She stood amidst the chaos of a nascent camp. She had selected a reasonably flat, clear area nestled against an old Konuan building. The foam floor she had sprayed down was almost dry. With the help of her scout robots she had moved the containers from their sleeping spot to the new camp. Most of the equipment was better left in the containers until needed, but every container could be quickly accessed and wasn’t part of the support for the tent. She addressed them through her link as Telisa and Magnus cleared the last stand of native plants.

“That was fast. I’ve got hours left to go,” Cilreth said, though in truth the camp was perfectly workable already, though it had no well or solar array deployed.

I just enjoy setting stuff up in a new place.

Cargo containers had started to form a shelter around the perimeter, and she’d put up an all-weather fabric cover to the area. A scout robot showed up, carrying one of the last containers on its back. It looked like an ant carrying a squarish boulder.

“We don’t know what killed the scout, but Shiny found people, Terrans I mean, on the other side of this old city.”

“I can’t reach Shiny,” Cilreth said. “I was meaning to ask you about it.”

Telisa was silent for a moment. “I don’t know, but it can’t be a good sign,” she said.

“What?” Magnus said, lagging in the conversation. “Oh. I can’t reach him either. Something is jamming us.”

“Something…” Cilreth started.

“It must be the other humans,” Telisa said. “They’d be the only ones who would know how to do that without examining our links.”

“It is probably the Terrans, but of course, any advanced race could have detected the signals and decided to disrupt them,” Magnus said. “Shiny could.”

“You’re still thinking he’s against us?” Cilreth said.

Magnus shrugged. “That’s not exactly what I meant, but still, it’s possible he’s doing it.”

It’s dangerous enough going to the frontier. We need to trust everyone on the team. Of course, I guess I quickly trusted Arlin and Leonard. Easier to trust my own race, I guess, justified or not.

“We can get along without him for now. The jamming could mean an imminent attack, though, down here or up there in orbit,” Telisa said.

“It’s worse than just losing touch with Shiny. I can only reach five scouts now,” Magnus said.

“What will the others do?”

“They’ll try and complete whatever mission each is on, then return to Clacker.”

“Maybe we should return to the Clacker, too,” Cilreth suggested.

“We need more information. I bet Shiny will figure out how to get back in touch with us. It’s true he’s not down here by our side, but he’s a valuable asset up there.”

“I’m going to go take a look at our Terran friends,” Magnus said. “We can’t make good decisions in the dark like this.”

“Be careful,” Telisa said.

Magnus looked thoughtful. “I know you’ve earned the stealth suit, but in this case it might be of more use to me. Just temporarily, of course,” he said to Cilreth.

“I’d love to share,” Cilreth said sweetly. “But no way is it going to fit your frame.”

Magnus frowned. Telisa smiled.

“Don’t be sad. I’m glad you’re a large specimen, dear,” she said playfully. “I have the stealthing sphere we picked up on Vovok, if you’d like to borrow it. And I do mean borrow! I can’t go giving away all my superpowers.”

Cilreth felt a bit of jealousy. On a frontier expedition with your lover. Nice on the surface of it. Unless things go horribly wrong.

Telisa tossed Magnus the tiny sphere from her pack. Somehow the Vovokan attendant spheres knew it was a peaceful transfer, so they didn’t move to intercept.

Those things are amazing, Cilreth thought. I need to figure out more about how they tick. Sigh. Later.

“Thanks,” Magnus said, slipping the sphere away in his pack. He headed off toward the center of the city. Telisa looked after him.

She’s dependent on him. But I should cut her some slack; she just lost her father. Who else does she have? I think that was it.

Telisa hadn’t mentioned a mother or other family, nor had Leonard.

“Well, at least it will go faster setting up the camp with two of us,” Cilreth said. Telisa returned her attention to the campsite.

“The camp looks sleepable,” Telisa said. “Let’s go take a peek in those big buildings over there before nightfall. I promise I’ll help with the camp more later.”

“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.

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!”