Parker Interstellar Travels 4: The Trilisk Hunt (14 page)

Chapter
16

Cilreth rested her head in her
hands to wait out a dull ache. Hours of studying Vovokan computers had resulted
in another bout of fatigue.

With two of me, I can do this
twice as fast with no need to integrate multiple simultaneous results. Three of
me, max, on eight-hour shifts.

Cilreth decided on two to
start. She arranged a schedule for both of herselves. She decided talking would
be minimal. As long as both were synced at the end of every shift, they would
essentially be one person with two bodies. There would be no reason to talk.

“Shiny? I’m ready.”

“Proceed to indicated,
displayed, targeted chamber,” Shiny said. Cilreth got a location pointer and
followed it through the
Clacker
with her link. Though most of the
Trilisk columns had been put into Shiny’s ship, the
Thumper
, some were
installed on the
Clacker
and a few more back at the home base.

Cilreth arrived at one of the
Trilisk column storage chambers. The columns had been installed in a large
room, looking much as they had appeared back on the planet where the PIT team
acquired them. She walked up to one and stared at it.

If understanding Vovokan
technology is so hard, imagine what it would take to truly understand these
Trilisk columns. Probably my unaugmented brain could never hope to grasp its
secrets.

“How do you know this will
work? I mean, all the others superseded into new bodies.”

“Shiny performed, actuated,
initiated procedure on Shiny.”

“Whoa. There are two of you
around here? Oh shit. More?”

“This duplicate only witnessed,
aware, know of one copy.”

“You are the… copy?”

“Affirmative, correct,
accurate.”

“Where is the original?”

“Asteroid base with Trilisk
AI.”

Of course. Shiny wouldn’t give
away his trump card, even to a copy.

“I thought your race was… uhm… I
guess you can trust yourself?”

“No.”

“Ah. Yah. Well I think I can
trust myself. Terrans are a bit… different.”

“Acknowledged, confirmed,
believed.”

“So what do I do?”

“No action required. Process
initiated, started, begun.”

“Oh.”

Cilreth had noticed nothing. Yet
somehow, Shiny had already started. Cilreth looked for signs of his work. The
only clue she found was a huge power draw from the column room. The
Clacker
could handle the demand though, at least for a time.

The column closest to Cilreth
started to rotate slowly. Then the tube exterior descended. Cilreth2 became
visible inside. Cilreth turned and walked out, trying to suppress a creepy
chill in her soul.

“Shiny, I’ll continue my shift
now,” Cilreth said. “I’m sure Cilreth2 knows exactly what to do.”

***

“Wooooooooo!” Siobhan yelled as
she sailed through the air. The wide-open sky was bright in all directions and
dotted with the tiny shapes of distant buildings in all directions. The air was
cool and smelled like cedar or evergreens. Her target building began to grow as
she neared. She spread her arms, increasing the drag of her upper body. Her
feet swung around toward the mass before her.

At the last moment, she felt a
tiny pull, then she landed just like coming back down from a high jump.

Could I have done so well
before? Only with luck. This new body rocks.

Siobhan laughed out loud then reined
herself in.

Oh yeah. Deadly unknown place.
Remain alert.

Siobhan looked around. From her
vantage point, she could not see the soldier robot that had arrived before her.
It was probably exploring the house for danger. She found it on the tactical
and fed its visual feed into her PV.

Siobhan took a little walk
around the outside surface. Artificial gravity kept her firmly on the building
no matter how it twisted or turned, as if she were a spider or a fly walking
across a ceiling corner.

These houses are so weird. All
six sides look like a roof. With doors and windows.

She decided she simply
associated the sides of the building with Terran roofs because whenever she had
stood on a house before, she had been on the roof. Here, you could stand on any
side of the house and be pulled toward it. Then it felt as if the house was “down”,
so it became the roof in her ingrained perception.

Siobhan looked out over an edge
of the building to see deeper into the space habitat. The distant sky was
filled with black specks. She did not remember so many houses being clustered
together before.

What the…?

She stared for a moment longer.
There were hundreds of them. Very distant. They looked darker, but smaller,
than the houses in the distance.

“I see some things… a lot of
things in the distance. Toward the center of the habitat,” Siobhan said.

“More specific,” Magnus
replied.

“They’re just specks. Too far
away,” she said.

“I see them too!” Caden
exclaimed. Siobhan knew he had gone house hopping in the same direction. He had
to be on a house nearby. “Are the houses closer together in that direction?”

Siobhan almost got some range
viewers out of her pack. Then she saw changes in the specks.

They were getting larger.

“Guys! Something is coming. A
hell of a lot of somethings.”

“Get into that house. Post the
soldier outside. Everyone, find cover!” Magnus ordered. “Do it quickly. If
there’s danger, we have no way of knowing what the enemy’s range might be.”

Siobhan ducked around the edge
of her house and looked for an entrance. She found a large one. It was a pair
of spring-loaded panels that could be pushed open from either direction. Most
of the smaller ones were made of four pieces. She drew her pistol and entered.

The interior looked as twisted
and confusing as the other houses she had seen. She stopped for two seconds to
listen. Utter silence. This time, Siobhan looked at the architecture with an
eye for defense. The interior was cluttered, filled with dozens of containers and
machines of bewildering variety. On her left she saw a series of glass tubes with
wires in them draining into a vat of green fluid, on her right some kind of
human-sized electronics project with a clear plastic case. The equipment was a
collection of some pieces that looked advanced and other things with technology
older than Terra could produce. It gave Siobhan the feel of a post-apocalyptic
society where everything had been cobbled together from old tech. Telisa had
agreed with that analysis: there seemed to be no one level of technology
prevalent.

She wandered through all the
junk until she found a niche to hide in. It was a spot about the size of a
shower tube nestled in a short hallway between two larger rooms. From her niche,
she could see parts of the outside sky through three windows, one nearby on her
left and two others across a wide room on her right.

Siobhan took stock of the
doors. She saw two but knew there had to be others in the house. Most of the
houses had a door or two on every side. There would be no way to cover them
all. The realization made her nervous.

Well, that’s what I get for
jumping all around on my own. Caden and I should have at least stuck together.

Siobhan opened her tactical. It
showed the positions of the rest of the team as well as the soldier robots. She
saw the soldiers had moved to the surfaces of the houses around them. Only one
soldier was on her house, but at least there were three or four who could cover
her house nearby.

Caden was very close, on a
house adjacent to hers, less than two hundred meters away.

Should I try to move over
there?

“Everyone hold your positions,”
Magnus transmitted. “Note the entrances to your houses. Caden, Siobhan, you have
soldiers on the houses around you. We’re not leaving you vulnerable.”

“And the objects?” Siobhan
asked.

“Machines. Alien, but they are
machines. After the trap we experienced, I’m assuming the worst,” Magnus said.

Pop. Pop. Zip… Bang. Pop.

A popping noise like
micrometeoroids impacting a hull started cracking through the house.
Siobhan’s sharp hearing pinpointed it as coming from the side toward the
oncoming machines. The alien machines were shooting at the soldier outside
the house! She saw the soldier robots shooting back in her tactical.

Frackjammers! Am I going to die
now? Just when things were getting cool.

“We’re being fired upon!”
Siobhan said. Magnus would know at the same instant she did, but Siobhan was
getting swept up in events. Better to overcommunicate than otherwise.

“Hold tight,” Magnus said. She
could hear the tension in his voice. She trusted Magnus already. He was not
cowering. He would come to back her up when he could.

Siobhan looked at her stunner
pistol. Would it even affect alien machines? The shock baton at her belt might
do better—but only at point-blank range. Siobhan took a grenade out of a side
pocket in her pack. She armed it through her link and gave it a mechanical
target signature.

The door to her left suddenly
opened. She had her pistol on it in a flash. But it was only her soldier
machine. It was missing two legs. The outer shell looked blackened and burned.

Oh damn, it’s halfway fragged,
and I’m next…

Her attendant spheres hovered
expectantly before her, ready to protect her. At least that was what Magnus had
said they would do.

Siobhan checked the tactical
again. Alien robots were landing on her house. About a dozen of them. She
realized most of her virtual training had been with team members at her side.
They had not done any sims where she was on her own, or close to on her own.

Bang. Boom.

More sounds of combat echoed in
the distance.

“It’s just you and me, huh?”
she said to the soldier machine out loud. “Let’s wait for them, then!” Siobhan
took an enormous breath. She was scared. And excited. Moments like these were
what she had spent her life seeking.

Working for PIT is exactly
where I want to be. Until it kills me.

Her soldier machine turned to
cover the door it had used with a mounted projectile launcher. The flaps of the
door started to move inward, so it shot.

Bang! Zip!

Siobhan heard a ricochet. Then
the other door in her sight opened.

A dark metal disc with stubby
legs pushed through. Siobhan shot it with her stunner. The thing kept coming.

Zipfft! Zipfft! Zipfft!

A hissing sound snapped three
times. Siobhan’s attendant spheres blurred. She heard the sounds of splattering
metal. Something hot struck her forehead, a tiny pinprick of pain.

Siobhan used the stunner again.
Another stubby-limbed machine floated into the room.

The Five can bite me! I won’t
die!

Siobhan updated the target
signature on her grenade by selecting the stubby-limbed machine in her sight
and sending the profile through her link. It took half a second, then the
grenade launched itself into the room. It blurred, reached a point halfway
between the two machines, and exploded.

Whirrrrrr Kaboom!

Shrapnel erupted in two tight
cones directed at both targets. The alien machines hurled away, damaged or
destroyed.

“Yah!” she yelled out loud and
through her link. She could tell from tactical chatter that Caden was fighting,
too. He shot again and again, in all likelihood taking out several targets. She
looked toward her soldier ally, but it was no longer sitting nearby. Her
tactical showed it moving away from her.

Siobhan took out another
grenade. It already had the targeting signature of its predecessor, thanks to a
nice bit of battlefield optimization built into the weapon. Her ears were still
sharp because her suit’s sound curtain had dampened the peaks of noise from the
shots and explosions. She heard more doors opening in the house.

Her link told her the soldier
machine was overheating, and then a small explosion rocked the house.

Krumpf. Zing! Smack!

Bits of debris migrated through
the house like falling dominos. Items would fly one way, reach another gravity
section, then fly another. They would rebound off things and fly off in random
directions. The debris caused other things to start flying around in a chain
reaction. Siobhan ducked.

Zip. Crack. Thump.

“Ah!” she yelped as pieces of
the house whirled over her. She closed her eyes and looked at the tactical. Her
attendant spheres kept her area fairly up to date, even though she could not
see them at the moment. Two flat disc machines and a larger torpedo-shaped
machine were approaching her position.

Siobhan loosed her second
grenade. She dared to watch it through narrowed eyes even though a few things
were still flying around the house. It zeroed in on the torpedo-shaped robot,
whirling toward it. Smoke erupted from the niche around Siobhan. She stepped
out into the corridor, eyes on the grenade.

Kill that thing…

The grenade faltered and struck
a wall. It ricocheted and hit another wall. For a moment it flew back toward
her. An attendant sphere shot out to meet it, but the grenade turned away.
Siobhan’s first thought was of alien jamming or interference. Finally it
whirled back toward the larger robot.

Kaboom!

The grenade exploded, breaking
the long robot in half.

Oh. The twisty gravity fields
in here confused the grenade. But it got the job done!

“The gravity in here confuses
the grenades,” Siobhan transmitted. “They still work, though,” she added. She
did not want anyone else on the team to think the grenades were useless.