Parker Interstellar Travels 4: The Trilisk Hunt (11 page)

“Still two robots left back
there,” Caden said. “Turn north now. We’re almost there.”

Boooom.

The team sprinted in the new
direction. Siobhan was in the lead, running gracefully now. As she approached a
patch of native plants, a reddish snake-thing struck from among the green clusters.
It darted down, heading straight for Siobhan’s head.

Siobhan grabbed the creature by
one end in a flash. She pulled it around her, whipping it in a circle with a
quick twist of her body, and sent it flying over the trees. She laughed.

“Too slow! We’re so fast and
strong I bet we could fight security robots with our bare hands!”

“That would be Magnus,” Maxsym
said.

“What? He’s not here.”

Maxsym shrugged. “Archaic
reference. Never mind.”

“Enough! To the bunker!” Caden
urged. He was in the rear now, looking for any signs of pursuit. They ran for
another long minute across the rocks, making incredible time.

I want them to stay low
, Caden
thought. He ran ahead to take the lead.
Follow me, keep a low profile.

They ran through a draw, almost
at the bunker. They just had to climb up a short cliff and they would be there.
Caden knew they would be in the open. From the bottom of the cliff he jumped
up, covering half the distance of the rocky wall in one shot. Then he found a
narrow ledge and waited, weapon scanning the horizon.

“Go, go!” he urged. The others
hit the cliff and started climbing. When they were three quarters of the way
up, Caden gave up watching and started climbing. He half expected to hear the
crack of a projectile weapon, but none came.

At the top, Caden saw the
bunker less than thirty meters away.

“This is it. Pile in,” Caden
transmitted. He led the charge for the ramp. Then his eye caught a glint of
steel. “Stop!”

The halt was almost comical.
Maxsym and Imanol tried to stop quickly, but they simply crashed instead. Their
new bodies were too fast, and no one had experience with a quick stop. Caden
stood silently and kept talking over his link.

“Grenade at the entrance.
Someone’s been here.” The others spotted it: a small metal sphere tucked away
beside the door, just inside the entrance.

“Lucky the grenade didn’t have
a camo shell,” Imanol said.

It would have in real life.
Magnus is just taking it easy on us first time today.

“This bunker has been
compromised. It’ll take time to get in,” Maxsym said. “There could be more than
one booby trap.”

Caden nodded. “There’s no one
in there, though,” Caden said.

“How do you know?” Siobhan
asked on the channel.

“The bunker has surface
defenses. But they haven’t shot at us. We’re sitting ducks.”

“As soon as they realize it’s
just us four, they might start shooting,” Imanol said.

If they are in there, we could
attack now and catch them by surprise with our speed. If they aren’t, we might
walk into more booby traps.

“Storm it?” asked Siobhan.

“No. I’ll kill the grenade.
Then cover close to the entrance. We’ll do a scan and see if anyone’s inside.”

Caden shot the grenade with his
rifle.

Boom… Brammmm!

It saw the round coming and
exploded just to spite them. The door of the bunker was so sturdy the grenade
did very little damage. They ran up to the entrance.

Magnus’s voice broke into the
environment.

“Caden, what’s your thinking on
the bunker? Why the slow approach?”

“If someone was in there, we’d
already be dead. They left us some traps. No point in rushing in there.”

“Good job. Your robots stayed
behind to cover your escape, just what they’re for. Next one is harder.
Siobhan, you take the lead on this one.”

Caden smiled. Of course Magnus
would make it challenging before the day was over, but Caden felt back on track.

Good results. I can do this.
Just like everything else. I’m going to excel at it.

Chapter
12

“Arrival at destination,
endpoint, terminus imminent.”

The buzzing voice of Shiny
interrupted Imanol’s study of the robots PIT used for expeditions. Their machine
intelligence seemed very mainstream for Terran robots, but some of the raw
physical specifications were impressive due to the integration of Vovokan
technology. It struck him as an odd combination of tame civilian robotics with
an infusion of amazing alien capabilities. However, Imanol felt Terran military
robots were more impressive. The weapons hardware carried by the PIT machines
had relatively low firepower, and they had no armor. A real space force assault
machine could put a man-sized hole in an armored bunker from ten thousand
meters. And that was the unclassified kind.

“What’s the planet like?” he
asked. Imanol rose from the comfortable chair in a near-empty room of the
Clacker
.
A faux view of space was anchored on one wall, making it look like a giant
window out onto the void.

“No planet located. Approaching
artificial environ, shell, habitat.”

Shiny forwarded a pointer to
incoming scanner data. It was all too raw, and Imanol had to struggle with it
to understand.

“Is there going to be a fight, Shiny?
Do they have weapons?”

“Probable, likely, possible,”
the alien buzzed in his link.

Its odd speech patterns
certainly help identify the speaker as nonhuman, as well as the buzzing voice,
he
thought.

“Why the buzz in your voice?
Was that your idea?”

“Historical accretion,
convention, tradition.”

“And the use of multiple words
with similar meaning?”

“Compensating for, mitigating,
amortizing inaccurate, fuzzy, approximate translation mechanisms.”

“Why don’t you just speak like
us?” Imanol complained.

He could probably just pick one
of the choices at each juncture and speak normally. But I guess it helps to
remind me he isn’t human.

“Compensating for, mitigating,
amortizing inaccurate, fuzzy, approximate translation mechanisms.”

“You broken there, bud? You
said the same thing twice.”

“Function is within
acceptable—”

“Yeah, got it,” Imanol
grumbled. It just was not any fun needling this one.

The scan of the space habitat
came up in Imanol’s link. He saw the habitat, though the amount of information
was still overload. He got a message from Magnus.

“Everyone, prepare your gear
and come to this bay. Unless the habitat starts shooting at our ships, we’ll be
investigating soon.”

“Magnus is calling for the
team,” Imanol said.
Funny, I’m chatting with this alien. Treating it like a
human. Does it think anything like us?

“Do you work with Telisa,
Cilreth, and Magnus because… you’re lonely?” asked Imanol. “I remember you said
your race is scattered now, from a war.”

“Mutually beneficial
relationship,” Shiny replied.

With a Terran, a terse reply
means he’s reluctant to share. With an alien, who knows?

Imanol abandoned the room and went
to his personal equipment cache. He felt excitement mixed with a healthy dose
of fear. Like in his previous life when he was hired to spy on a dangerous
person. Now, though, he felt more like a marine hitting the breach. At least
they had the machines to go first.

He arrived at the cache room.
It was a personal vault he had asked Magnus for. He grabbed backpacks of gear.
He was already wearing his Veer suit. He grabbed a twenty-round projectile
pistol, a ten-shot laser pistol, and a five-shot stunner. Then he grabbed two
knives and sheathed them in receptacles on the outside of his thighs.

Imanol had been training hard.
He could not shake a feeling of unease with his new abilities. He kept
picturing the
real
Imanol sitting asleep in some Trilisk tube somewhere,
unaware that his life had been stolen. Imanol felt glad he was the superior
copy, but with that secret sliver of relief came a heaping of guilt.

I’ll give him a fair shake
,
Imanol promised himself.
I’ll trade back and forth with him, or maybe even
fix him up when we figure it out. By the tentacle! It’s so easy to forget the
original me because it feels as if I were the original. I remember everything
that has ever happened to me.

Imanol knew in real life,
things seldom worked out cleanly. He was just glad to be the one out and
around, and at the same time knowing his real self would be equally unhappy to
be the one entombed indefinitely.

He arrived at the common room
and found his teammates were there except Telisa and Arakaki.

Magnus waved at him. Imanol
nodded and sat down. Imanol respected Magnus and Arakaki. They were the only
ones smart enough to ignore his trolling.

“Here you go,” Magnus said. Two
grenades rolled over to Imanol, so he grabbed them and put them into a
convenient pocket in his pack.

“As you know, we’ve arrived at
the site of our next endeavor. Naturally the question is, what the hell are we
doing here?” Magnus said.

Imanol nodded, as did Maxsym.
Siobhan and Caden just watched intently.

“On our last expedition, we
were exploring Trilisk ruins. We found the supersedure devices there. We were
also shocked to discover that a Trilisk had lived there for a long time, in the
body of one of the natives.”

Magnus paused to let that sink
in. Everyone was so amazed they did not say anything for fear of delaying more
information from Magnus.

“The Trilisk had been hunting
Terrans on the planet in its native body. One by one, over the course of weeks.
And it killed several more people exiting the scene. Then it eluded us by means
unknown. We’re here to track it down. Failing that, I’m curious why it came
here. Even if we don’t catch the thing or grab any of its toys, wherever in the
galaxy a Trilisk wants to go… I’d like to check it out.”

Imanol looked at his
companions. Maxsym looked concerned. Siobhan and Caden were simply excited.

Two sappy kids ready to go camp
out
, Imanol thought.

“Trilisks are way beyond us in
technology, or at least they were when they were around. Isn’t it folly to
chase one?” Imanol asked.

“Maybe,” Magnus admitted. “What
are your thoughts? If the Trilisk came here, don’t you want to see what this
is?”

“We’ll be like mice chasing a
cat in a running factory,” Imanol said. He saw no reason for optimism.

Caden’s eyebrows went up.
Siobhan looked happy.

“Why sugarcoat it? This is
crazy,” Imanol said.

“The habitat may not be
Trilisk,” Cilreth said. “The planet it came from was deserted by Trilisks long
ago. This may just be another… ‘host’ site. If the Trilisk is alone, with
limited supplies, it may be catchable.”

“Shiny, any comments? Does the
habitat look Trilisk in origin?” asked Magnus.

“Negative,” Shiny answered in
the link channel. “Building materials different, inconsistent, distinct from
known Trilisk construction.”

“Have Vovokans encountered the
like before?”

“Negative.”

“Did you retrieve any samples
from the Trilisk?” asked Maxsym.

“No. It switched from a native
body into a human one, then escaped mysteriously.”

It switches bodies. Of course.
Like we did using its technology.

“It switches bodies?” asked
Caden.

“Yes. I don’t know if it was a
tourist or a scientist or what, but it has changed bodies. I don’t know what an
original Trilisk looked like exactly, but they were trilaterally symmetrical,
of course—three legs, three arms, three… faces.”

Three faces? Sounds even
creepier than Shiny.

Imanol’s link received a
picture of a man.

“That’s the Trilisk’s last
known appearance. By this time, who knows?”

“Then how can we find it?”

“Shiny, again,” Telisa said.
Imanol looked around. His link told him Telisa had joined the conversation as
she approached the periphery of their meeting. “He says the Trilisk has some
signature cues he can pick up with the
Clacker
and our scouts. Unless it
has learned to mask itself.”

“Learned to mask itself, or
bothered to? It’s a Trilisk, after all,” Maxsym said.

Magnus shrugged. “It’s
dangerous. We’re taking risks here.” Telisa walked into the room and picked up
her grenades from Magnus.

“So how do we get into this
habitat?” asked Siobhan. She had not lost any enthusiasm. If anything, the
prospect of danger simply fueled her on.

“Cilreth and Shiny are looking
at that now,” Telisa said. “We’ll head over and get ourselves in through a door
or portal of some kind. Failing that, we can try to cut our way in.”

Imanol realized sheepishly that
Cilreth was not present. She had not shown up much, in person or in training.
Magnus had told him she was their half-pilot, half-cybernetic expert, studying
the alien technology they had found.

“The
Clacker
has some
smaller ships that can take us over,” Telisa said. “They have the ability to
protect a pocket of atmosphere in a small space between ships. If there’s an
airlock, we can access it that way.”

“Why do you say
if
there’s an airlock?” Caden asked.

“This is an alien place. Maybe
the inside isn’t even pressurized. Maybe it’s just a giant robot. Maybe they
teleport themselves inside instantly. We just don’t know. I’m just hoping for
an airlock,” Telisa said.

Imanol nodded.

That just serves to bring the
point home: so much we don’t know. The thing we do know is that Trilisk is
dangerous. And we’re going in after it.

Chapter
13

Maxsym carried two ridiculously
heavy packs to the bay. His new body was amazing. He had taken some samples of
himself to study, but it would take more time than he had before the expedition.
He could tell from a coarse examination of the tissue there were significant
cell membrane and mitochondrial modifications. He had almost dared to ask if he
could skip the trip and stay back to analyze the changes that had been made to
them. In the end, it did not seem like a request the PIT leaders were likely to
grant.

Maybe after I’ve proven myself
to them, I can take a role as researcher. Surely they need someone to analyze
and understand some of the biological treasures they’ve come across.

He had lugged one extra pack
just for collecting samples and specimens. The prospect of examining random
alien life excited him more than the idea of hunting a Trilisk. In fact, given
any opportunity, Maxsym planned on staying back and studying local fauna rather
than going after the advanced alien. They had told him bad things about it, but
it seemed a distant threat. And if it was running, that meant it posed even
less of a danger.

At least he had his brand-new
portable analyzer. He found its appearance in his gift box very mysterious but
still intended to utilize the device to its fullest extent. Sadly, the alien
Shiny had declined to allow Maxsym a sample of its body tissue. He did not
blame it—but felt acute disappointment at the lost opportunity. The creature
was more than amazing. After coming out of the boring simulation test, seeing
the alien had been a high point of Maxsym’s life.

Maybe I could ask Shiny for
some primitive life-forms from his planet to study?

But Maxsym was headed into
alien territory right now. He wished it were a planet and not a space environ.
Still, he figured there had to be odd new life-forms inside, even if he only
had a few domestic creatures to choose from. He could even settle for an alien
corpse or two.

Their shuttle sat inside the
bay when he arrived. It looked alien. Vovokan, he corrected himself. Unlike the
rest of the
Clacker
, it had apparently been made by Shiny. It resembled
a fat beetle with two long protrusions extending from the sides and two more at
angles toward the front. He could not guess their purpose. Magnus, Caden, and
Siobhan waited out on the open floor. Maxsym headed for them.

“Finally,” Caden breathed. Maxsym
assumed this meant he had taken too long. But Siobhan only smiled.

“Have everything?” she asked.

“We’ll find out,” Maxsym said.

“I don’t think this station is
Trilisk in design,” Cilreth said, walking into the bay. Maxsym turned his head
to look. Telisa walked beside her. Maxsym saw something odd. He blinked.

There is a… there are several
things floating around her. Telisa too.

“Shiny agrees with you,” Telisa
said. “But as we’ve found out, the Trilisks come to many places inhabited by
non-Trilisks. Apparently sometimes in secret. Whoever lives here may not even
be aware of its presence.”

“Okay, I have to ask, what are
those things circling around you?” Maxsym asked. “We have flying grenades now,
too?”

“More presents,” Magnus said.
“We’ll pick ours up soon enough,” he said. On cue, a squad of flying spheres
entered the room and headed toward them. Jamie Arakaki walked up to the group
from another direction. She looked packed and ready to roll. The spheres paired
off and started to orbit each of them.

“Should I be nervous about
this?” Caden said, looking put off.

“These are Vovokan attendant
spheres,” Magnus said. “Trust me, you want these things around. They’re very
useful toys. Think of them first just like the flying eyes we used in virtual
training. You can send one ahead and integrate its sight with yours in combat.”

“And then?” Siobhan asked.

“And then, know that they’re
much nicer than the flying eyes,” Arakaki said. “They serve as bodyguards. Each
one can intercept incoming rounds and defeat them. They can ward off hostile
animal attacks, administer basic first aid should you be rendered unconscious,
and a list of other useful things. You can thank Shiny for them when they save
your ass.”

“Can we trust these things?”
Siobhan said.

“That is a matter of some
debate,” Arakaki told Maxsym on a private link channel. Siobhan and Caden
looked at Arakaki, but Arakaki was not looking back. Maxsym surmised Arakaki
had only sent the message to the new recruits.

“Yes, you can trust them,”
Telisa said aloud. “Shiny has had opportunities to save or kill us all, and
he’s saved us many times.”

Interesting that not everyone
sees eye to eye on the Vovokan stuff,
Maxsym thought.
But in a way
that’s good. If everyone were all sunshine about it, I’d become paranoid they
were under alien mind control. But that makes no sense because if they were,
I’d soon be the same.

“He wants to hunt this Trilisk
as well?” Maxsym asked.

Can’t we just study Shiny?

“Yes,” Telisa said, though it
looked as if she held something back. The group walked to the shuttle. Magnus
led the way around back. For some reason, Telisa and Cilreth broke off and went
toward the front.

Maxsym saw an opening in the
back. He walked up a very Terran-looking ramp and stepped into the alien craft.
The inside was smooth, devoid of many features, and spacious. He flopped
heavily onto a low chair that was nothing more than a metal pedestal. He
noticed the others were perched awkwardly onto similar pedestals, which were
arranged in pairs.

Vovokan, I suppose… at least
they have chairs at all. I bet many aliens don’t.

“Is this the cargo bay?” he
asked.

Siobhan only shrugged in reply.
She looked a bit stiff. Maybe nervous? She clutched a long rod of metal with a
thick end like a mace. Maxsym recognized it from some of their training VRs as
a shock baton.

Siobhan is ready to fight.
Maybe I should be thinking more about the alien we’re hunting and less about my
studies.

He glanced at his own weapon, a
ten-shot projectile pistol with a one-shot stunner under the barrel. He didn’t even
know where his extra magazines were.

Caden sat across the wide
space, about five meters away. He looked eager, thrilled. He smiled at Maxsym.
Maxsym smiled back, though he did not feel there was much to smile about just
yet.

“Action at last,” Caden transmitted.
Maxsym saw the message had been sent only to him, Siobhan, and Imanol.

Imanol and Magnus piled into
the cargo space.

“The gang’s all here,” Telisa’s
voice sounded through Maxsym’s link.

“Then we’re ready to hit it,”
said Magnus.

They sound like it’s a wartime
invasion.

“There are still no signs of… resistance?”
asked Maxsym.

“Nope. We can’t see anyone or
anything on the surface or near it,” Magnus said.

Maxsym expected some kind of
door to close behind him, but instead the shuttle simply lifted off the surface
of the bay silently, except for the clang of the discarded ramp. He looked
questioningly at Magnus. The man shrugged.

“The ramp was makeshift, just
for us,” he explained. “Some Vovokan tech keeps the air in here. The same thing
we will use to connect to the habitat.”

Magnus sounded calm. Maxsym
resolved to simply not look out the back of the shuttle. He felt his heart rate
increase uncomfortably.

The shuttle lurched up and then
accelerated in a direction parallel to the bay outside. The door remained open.
Maxsym accepted a video feed from the shuttle and watched as they left the
Clacker
.
An enormous gray sphere started to grow in his view.

Amazing. And I thought the
Clacker
was huge. This has a diameter over thirty kilometers!

“Shiny found us a door. We’ll
be there soon,” Cilreth transmitted. Maxsym just sat tight and ignored the
gaping hole that felt as if it would suck them all out of the shuttle any
second.

They kept approaching the huge
space habitat. It dwarfed the shuttle. Maxsym felt as if they were landing on
the planet from some of the views being piped in. Finally, some surface
features started to resolve into details: small domes and dimples in the
surface. They approached a dimple, and it grew into a depression in the surface
the size of a coliseum.

The shuttle settled into the
dark hollow of the station. He saw the gray material obscure the open doorway,
making him feel safer for a moment. Then Maxsym heard a sound like escaping
air. His heart accelerated as he felt a slight wind go by, but the pressure
remained normal. A large square formed by breaks in the surface lay outside the
shuttle.

Some kind of door. A large
door.

“What now?” Siobhan asked.

“We find a way in, or cut our
way in,” Magnus said. “Soldier bots first. Then the scout bots. Finally, us.
It’s a big station. And we have no way of knowing if the Trilisk is still here.
But if it is, this is going to be rough.”

Maxsym realized he had not seen
the robots when they loaded up. He assumed they must have loaded themselves
earlier into some other compartment. He caught sight of movement.

“The door is opening,” Caden
said, bringing up his weapon.

“Shiny is opening the door,”
Cilreth said. “He didn’t figure out the code, but he… knows how to create a
wire where there is no wire, apparently. Some kind of way to complete a circuit
without a solid conductor… he routed energy directly to the opening mechanism,
bypassing the lock altogether.”

Siobhan looked amazed. “He
didn’t even have to touch it,” she said. “I need to learn that one.”

Maxsym started again as he
caught movement from the corner of his eye. Four soldier bots unfolded from the
wall beside him. They marched forward, jumped out from the shuttle, weightless,
and then clambered into the habitat. Two scout machines followed suit. Maxsym
half expected something violent to happen, but everything remained quiet. Then
he realized he could not hear the clanking of their feet any longer, either.
The air exchange barrier blocked any sound from coming into the shuttle.

Magnus must have noted his
behavior. He sent a private message.

Stay calm and with us, Maxsym.
You’ll be okay.

Maxsym nodded. He took out his
air systems and prepared to select one. A scout robot sampled the air. He knew
they could not have mixed the atmosphere in the station with the shuttle air
yet.

“Looking at the atmospheric
profile, the system says we should take a shot before going in there,” Cilreth
said. “Maxsym, does that look sane to you?”

Maxsym received a pointer to
the air analysis. He looked it over for a few seconds.

“I concur. A bicarbonate blood
stabilizer should be sufficient,” he said. “That is injectable BC309 in these
standardized kits. Feed your kits the atmosphere profile, and they should
formulate that if working properly.”

Maxsym put the complicated air
systems back and grabbed his medical kit. The air was close to breathable for
Terrans: all the more convenient for their search. He sent his kit the correct
injectable through his link. It emitted a clear plastic ampule for him. He took
the light blue vial and connected it to an injection port on his Veer suit
underneath his left arm. He felt a light snap and then detached the empty
container. The others were busy doing the same.

“Pressure is matching; give it
a second,” Magnus said. They waited in silence for a long minute. Maxsym
shuffled his items and decided without the atmosphere packs, he might be able
to take only one pack in for now. He sorted what he had, building a pack to
discard. Then he finished and looked up. He caught the end of a strange look
from Siobhan.

So they find me odd. Fine.

The sound changed. It became
fuller, with a whisper of wind. Maxsym caught the sound of metal clacking
against ceramic.

Magnus walked through into the
habitat. Caden was on his heels. Siobhan followed eagerly. Maxsym and Imanol
looked at each other a moment. Telisa tromped past them to go in. Imanol
followed her, so Maxsym was the last to walk in.

Maxsym’s usual calm dissolved
as he absorbed the scene from within. He floated weightless through a short
tunnel of ceramic. The light grew brighter as he advanced. The tunnel led to an
open square area the size of a large house with the bright light of day shining
down on it. Once inside, he got pulled to the side by an invisible force. The
others had decided that was “down” and started to walk again. Maxsym rolled to
his feet.

The others were moving about.
Maxsym’s attention was on the “sky”. It was filled with hundreds of… floating
buildings of gray, red, and green. The sky buildings looked jagged, composed of
sharp angles. Their surfaces held many round plates Maxsym assumed were
windows. It was hard to discern their size, as he had nothing to judge by. The
sky was otherwise light bluish-gray. The houses were evenly spaced, seemingly
out to infinity, though Maxsym knew the habitat was of limited size.

This is all real.

Maxsym felt slightly manic. He
looked all around within the cul-de-sac for signs of life. Everywhere he looked
he saw only the smooth gray walls of the outer hull of the habitat, devoid of
anything that looked natural. Caden scouted the perimeter of the depression.
Maxsym did not see the scout robots, though the four soldiers remained nearby.
The Blood Glades champion grabbed a rope to scale the wall at the edge of the open
area. Maxsym realized the scouts must have sent the ropes up to climb to the
top.

As Caden cleared the top,
Maxsym noticed his friend looked very bright. The color of his dark Veer suit
suddenly flickered white.