The Trilisk Supersedure

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.

“Don’t move suddenly or I’ll blow your asses off,” she summarized.

All four men started at her sudden statement. Arakaki watched carefully. Though they all moved in response before their minds could fully process the meaning of her threat, none of them reached for any weapons, so they lived.

“Please don’t fire,” one of the men said. He had a ruddy nose and star-baked skin that almost matched his red robes.

“Surprise inspection,” Arakaki barked, as if that were all the explanation necessary. Arakaki kept her weapon in the general direction of the acolytes. With their signatures logged, it would require minimal aiming to wipe them all out with a single mental command or pull of her finger.

“Where are your supplies?” she asked.

“We don’t have anything of use to you,” another one said. The one who had answered had no hair. He wore a plain yellow robe.

“Show me what you have. I want to know how you survive out here.”

“In here,” said the bald man in the yellow robe.

Arakaki chomped down on the sliver in her mouth and followed. Her finger was relaxed near the trigger of her PAW, and her thoughts remained close to the fire control in her link.

They led her to another dismal rock room. She carefully squatted and followed them through a pulled Konuan grille. More grilles were still in place above and below, but the grilles in the other four directions had been pulled out.

“Here are many of our supplies,” the man said. “Of course, we have some equipment deployed around. Solar cells and some photosynthesis modules are over our heads, on the top of the ridge.”

The man indicated a waist-high pile of packs and equipment. Arakaki looked things over, still keeping one eye on the pilgrims.

She found a PSG stunner, three grenades, and two large projectile weapons. She saw clips for some other handheld projectile weapons. There were food wrappers and some half-empty backpacks. She counted eight of the backpacks.

“Where did you get that stuff?”

“That’s what little we have left of our equipment.”

A metal sphere attracted her attention. At first she thought it was a grenade, but it was too large. She reached out to pick it up. As her hand approached, a small handle extended for her to grasp. It was lighter than a grenade.

So it has power…but it doesn’t offer my link any services. So what the hell is it? “What’s this?” Arakaki demanded.

“I don’t know,” the man said.

She put it within her pack without taking her attention from her weapon. “I saw your packs in the other room. These aren’t yours. Those weapons are varied. Also not yours. Some of them are new. Obtained since Holtzclaw interviewed you before.”

“The UED leader? I thought he decided to leave us alone. We’ve had various members join us from all over the frontier. No deserters from the UED, though.”

“Then where are they? Answer my questions or else. We’ve tolerated you for a long time. You don’t want to be on our bad side. You know we have artillery covering this site. We can send a present your way anytime we want.”

“We’ve lost some pilgrims. The planet can be cruel. Also, some strangers came by from time to time. They were violent. It wasn’t our intention. But we have to defend ourselves.”

“You men? You keep the pistols under your robes?”

The men were silent for a moment. “Yes, we have pistols. But usually we let the Konuan handle troublemakers.”

Troublemakers…like me. Like the UED soldiers who have died?

She made a point of aligning her weapon at the head of the man who spoke. “You’re on its side, then,” she said. “You help it kill us.”

“Only the ones who come in here and threaten us directly. Please just leave.”

“The Konuan protected us,” another said.

Another of the men winced as he said it.

That must be true. Or is he wincing because he knows that guy’s a buckle bulb?

“You confuse protection with predation,” she said. “Why hasn’t it eaten you?”

“We respect it. We learn from it.”

“It is smart,” Arakaki said. “Real smart. But why would it teach you anything?”

“If you want to see it, we can show you.”

Arakaki’s face tightened. “What do you mean, show me?”

“The Konuan. We can show you. You can meet it. See for yourself. Leave your weapons, pledge yourself to it, and it will spare you.”

“Like it spared the owner of that stunner there? Or the owner of that sugar kit?”

“They didn’t give up their weapons. They were a threat. It easily dispatched them.”

“Finally, something I believe. Okay, show me where I can meet it, then take off.”

“If you try to harm it—”

“I’ll take my chances. Now hurry up,” Arakaki said.

The bald man in the robe nodded assent and walked off. Arakaki stepped away from the others, then turned to follow.

The man led her through a patch of blackvines. Arakaki scanned the sluggishly moving tendrils of the plants for concealed danger. Her eyes and her weapon didn’t note anything amiss.

Beyond the blackvines, they came to a dirty old tunnel.

This could be Trilisk, Arakaki thought. But this isn’t very deep.

She knew that under the square chambers of the Konuan, which were stacked atop each other haphazardly, the Trilisk tunnels ran from building to building. The UED soldiers had not figured out why the Trilisks had built the tunnels, though some thought it was to spy on the Konuan or conduct experiments on them without being seen.

Arakaki smelled the monster.

This guy knows what he’s talking about. The monster has been here. No doubt they’ve been sacrificing people to it all along. That’s why it left them alive. Until there are no people left.

They came to a large square room. It was a dead end at the moment, with its grilles intact.

It can still attack from any direction, and it can run if it senses an ambush. If the monster ever runs from anything.

A huge bowl in the center of the room held some bones.

What’s left of the sacrifices.

The robed man turned to regard Arakaki. She pointed her carbine at his face. “Maybe I’ll shoot your legs and leave you as the sacrifice this time,” she said.

“It won’t eat me. But it will eat you, if you insist on the weapons,” he said.

She made a face of disgust and indicated the exit with a twitch of her barrel. “Beat it.”

“What?”

“Take off. Now. Before I change my mind.”

The man frowned, but he moved to the exit.

To him, I’m just another victim to his god. We’ll see about that.

As soon as the pilgrim had left the room, Arakaki took out three grenades. She dropped two to the floor; the devices slowly rolled out to the left and right. They rolled through the grilles to take up positions in adjacent rooms.

She tossed the last grenade up through the grille on the ceiling. That was the direction of attack she feared the most: it liked to dissolve Terrans’ heads off.

The grenades armed with a signature Arakaki had designed to try to match the Konuan. What few glimpses of the creature they had collected showed it was large, flat, and silent. It liked to move on walls and ceilings or across the plants just as often as it would be on the ground. It had a low body temperature despite being able to move very quickly. It was also associated with electromagnetic anomalies, but Arakaki had just used that to make the grenades even more likely to target and strike movement when odd fields were detected.

Arakaki leaned back against the cool wall beside the entrance tunnel. She touched the grenade around her neck. Ironically, its cold, deadly presence settled her nerves. She believed if that grenade ever went off, at least she would be taking the Konuan with her. She chomped on the sliver in her mouth.

With the grenade right around my neck, it’ll be “a bang loud enough to wake Cthulhu up.” That’s what he used to say about the Hellrakers.

She drew her laser pistol with her left hand, then waited.

Within ten minutes she got a ping. The UED sensor stationed on a nearby cliffside had picked something up. Arakaki had been tuning their probes to detect the Konuan for a long time. Though the probe’s mission had been to detect Terrans and Terran machines, the probes had a wide range of sensory abilities. This probe told her now that something was approaching, and it wasn’t human.

Arakaki felt a rush hit her system. She wanted to do something, to shoot or break into a sprint, anything. But she just took a deep breath and waited.

The contact slipped away for a few seconds, then came back, closer to the caves where she waited. Then it moved still closer.

Will it come in behind me or drop in from above?

The contact moved within an eighth of a kilometer, then disappeared.

It’s in the tunnels ahead of me, she guessed. Arakaki slowed her breathing and watched her weapon’s sensors. Nothing. The grenades hadn’t seen anything, either.

Another minute scraped by. Arakaki heard something, distant, so faint she wasn’t sure if there had even been a noise. Another minute passed. The laser became heavy in her grasp. She leaned forward from the wall, standing with her weight even on each foot.

The probe outside picked the contact back up. It was moving away.

“Why won’t you just die?” she whispered.

The ghost moved about a quarter of a kilometer, dropping in and out of sight. Then it stopped. It didn’t leave the range of the probe. It lingered.

The damn thing wants me to come after it. So it can kill me somewhere else.

Arakaki almost growled in frustration. Then she opened a link to Holtzclaw.

“This is Captain Arakaki, requesting a Hellraker round,” she said. Holtzclaw replied within three seconds.

“You’ll have it in thirty seconds. Send the coordinates.”

The ghost started to move away again.

“Frag me,” she said aloud. “Scratch that,” she added. “Sorry, sir.”

She called back her grenades and snatched them up. Arakaki headed out after the sensor ghost.