Parker Interstellar Travels 4: The Trilisk Hunt (16 page)

“It could sense danger?”

“I think it was more than
that,” Maxsym said. “I believe the Blackvines are intelligent. They are the
builders here. I believe this habitat belongs to them. And I wouldn’t be
surprised if they’re not happy to see us.”

Chapter
18

“I’ve picked up some traces of
suspicious activity,” Caden transmitted. He had been in a floating house poring
through the machine video feeds for hours, both present and past, searching for
signs of intelligence from the Blackvines.

“Really? Tell us,” Telisa said.
As far as Caden knew, she was mustering robotic reinforcements with Magnus.

“Items have been moving between
these houses. In large containers. Sometimes they seem connected to our
movements. See here, after we entered our third house, the scout sees a large
gray container moving away from the far side shortly thereafter.”

“Containers? Some kind of
automated system carrying waste, maybe?” Siobhan said.

“Why wasn’t this brought to our
attention?” Magnus asked.

“The scouts first obtain a
‘baseline’ of activity of a new environment, against which they can pick out
unusual events. The scouts have seen these container transfers from the
beginning. They’re just like the houses and the sky, a part of what it’s like
here, and so they think it’s not an event worth flagging.”

“But you noticed it?”

“I saw a container moving a
long ways off in a vision feed. Of course I was intrigued immediately.
Investigation uncovered the rest. These containers are moving around all the
time. They move more often when we’re nearby.”

“That’s definitely worth
looking into,” Siobhan said. “Let’s find one of these things and take a look.”

Telisa nodded. “Yes. My
curiosity is piqued, too. We’re coming back from the entrance lock.”

“Did you get some soldiers?”
Caden asked.

“We have twenty with us.
Cilreth and Shiny said we’ll have a hundred in a couple hours.”

That’s more like it. We should
have just invaded this place,
Caden thought.

“Don’t start without us,”
Magnus said. “Mucking with the containers might incite a violent response.”

“Acknowledged,” Caden said. He
brought up a quick surveillance program he had put together to look for more
boxes. Within a few minutes, he found one on the move.

“There’s one!” Caden said. He
sent a location pointer to Siobhan’s link and then grabbed his gear.

“Magnus said not to start
without him,” Siobhan said aloud.

“He said we should not open one
without him. Or mess with it. We can shadow one until they get here. In fact
that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, finding one for us to check out—when
they get here.”

Siobhan smiled. “You know I’m
in. Arakaki, though?”

“We’ll keep them apprised,”
Caden told her aloud.

“Arakaki?” transmitted Caden.
“Siobhan and I found a crate on the move. We’re shadowing until Mag and Telisa
arrive.”

He walked out without waiting
for an answer, Siobhan on his heels.

“Careful,” Arakaki said. “Keep
us in the loop. You need backup?”

“I think we have it. Cilreth
said she’d let us know the instant any more robot armadas show up.”

Caden jumped through the house
toward the outer wall. He was now convinced that jumping through was the
fastest way. Usually he got pulled toward any surface he approached, so it was
easiest to jump around just like outside and always have your feet ready to
push off of any wall or pillar in the way. Once they emerged from one of the
trapdoors, Caden checked Siobhan’s chute. Then he turned, and she did the same
for him.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Hell yes!”

“This way,” he indicated. They
jumped off together and flew through the sky, weightless.

I can’t believe I’m here. I
wonder if the space force would have been so incredible?

Caden doubted it. But he still
wondered every few hours.

They jumped from house to
house. Caden kept an eye on the distant skies, half expecting to see a fleet of
flying enemies approaching. Caden hopped onto the fourth or fifth house and
then stopped to look around.

“Should be visible from the
other side,” he said. They walked across the outer surface of the house. Every
time they reached a “cliff” of the house, they just stepped over it and the
cliff face became the new “down”.

He spotted the crate. It was
moving slowly away from the house under them toward a nearby one.

“Weird. This has been happening
all around us the whole time?” Siobhan asked.

“Yep. Shall we get closer?”

“Telisa and Mag are about three
minutes out,” Siobhan said.

“Then we can hop on that crate
and wait for them,” Caden said. “If something goes wrong, they’ll be right
behind us.”

Siobhan shrugged. “We gotta be
team players here,” she said out loud. Her voice expressed resigned
disappointment with the sentiment.

“Yeah, okay, we can wait three
minutes.”

Caden and Siobhan watched the
mysterious container make its way toward the far house. About a minute before
the other two arrived, they jumped for the target house. Their jump was too
slow, so they each added some boost with small cylinder fans Cilreth had
manufactured to help them maneuver in the open air. Just for fun, Caden had
mounted his cylinder fans on his ankles.

As they arrived and made
practiced landings, Siobhan looked back at the container.

“Wait. The container is moving
away. It’s changed course!”

“What’s the situation?” asked
Magnus from the far house.

“It turned away from this house
as we arrived,” Siobhan told him.

“Okay, I’m having these scouts
tie it up.”

A scout flew by and fired a
smart rope at the container. It swung by gracefully on the end of the rope,
attached a second rope, and spooled out farther to land on Caden and Siobhan’s
house.

“That’s one. We need another.”

The container started to strain
against the line. The smart rope held it.

A second smart rope wrapped the
crate from a third house the container had been headed for. Between the two
lines, the crate was trapped.

“I think it’s anchored in place
now,” Magnus said.

The container stopped straining
against the smart ropes for a moment. Then it started to rise.

“Shit!” Magnus exclaimed.

“We need at least three ties,”
Siobhan called. “I’m bringing in another soldier.”

“No, I think we have it,”
Telisa said. The container slowed as tension built in the lines.

“Okay so… get it open,” Magnus
said.

“It isn’t sturdy,” Caden said.
“We can just break it open.”

Magnus directed a soldier to
walk out on a line. Everyone saw what he was up to. They all knew the Vovokan
legs on the robots were amazingly strong. When the soldier arrived, Magnus
adjusted the smart ropes through his link, opening a wide spot. The soldier
starting tearing into the box. It pried one of the sides open. Caden saw the
door on the box was similar to the ones on the houses: some kind of
spring-loaded trapdoor.

Magnus maneuvered closer with a
tiny jet of air. He flashed a light into the interior. “It’s one of those black
plant creatures,” he said.

Caden moved in closer, his
weapon ready.

“Blackvine?” asked Arakaki.

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“It’s an alien creature,
possibly intelligent,” Maxsym said.

Caden blinked.
What feed is
he watching?

“We should release the
container and let it be on its way. This is some kind of air car,” transmitted
Maxsym.

Everyone digested that for a
moment.

“Those Blackvines have only
moved a little, a kind of rustling,” said Telisa.

“What does it have on its
roots?” asked Siobhan.

Magnus shined the light inside
again. “Some kind of a rolling tray.”

“It has no roots,” Maxsym said.
“It radiates from a central mass. The supporting members are tendrils just the
same as the rest. I don’t think it even has an ‘up’ or ‘down’ in the same sense
our bodies do.”

“It’s just a plant. It’s being
moved, that’s all. I bet the next container has some other inanimate cargo,”
said Caden.

Telisa took a quick peek
inside. “It’s either mostly unaware of us… or cowering,” she concluded. “Maybe
it’s terrified or the equivalent for its race. We have to let it go. Who knows
what kind of damage we are doing to it, or to our relations with it?”

“We need to know if it’s a
plant or not,” Caden said. “Can’t you sample it and see what it’s made of?”

“How will that tell us if it’s
intelligent?” asked Maxsym. “You’re asking us to just cut a limb off another
being? Besides, I already conducted some more humane scans. I know a lot about
it.”

“We can go look in another
container,” Caden said again.

“Yes. Let’s go,” Magnus said.
Telisa released the smart ropes. The container went on its way, tracked by a
scout machine.

It took them three hours to
catch up to another of the moving containers. When they pried it open, they
found the same thing inside.

“It’s a Blackvine,” Caden said.
His voice was apologetic.

“That doesn’t mean they are the
makers of this space hab,” Siobhan said. “These could just be like feral dogs
or cats the habitat’s automated systems take care of.”

“A lot of possibilities,”
Telisa said. “But we have to take Maxsym’s assertion more seriously now.”

Chapter
19

Imanol tried to help Maxsym out
with his new obsession about the Blackvines. At first he did not like Maxsym
much, but grudgingly Imanol became aware that Maxsym was more intelligent than
he was. Imanol was not sure if that made him like Maxsym or hate him, but at
least the biologist had earned respect.

“We asked for an analysis of
the Blackvines from the scout logs and all the sensor info from inside the
habitat,” Imanol sent back to the
Clacker
.

“You did? Oh, yes. I have it
here,” Cilreth answered.

“You forgot?”

“No, of course not. I have it,”
Cilreth said. There was a pause.

“What, hiding back at the
spaceship getting too rough for you?” Imanol growled.

“Do you want my help or not,
jerk? I’m doing my part here and you know it.”

“Yah, okay let’s have it
already.”

She’s acting a little weird.
Kind of rattled?

“It’s really amazing!” Cilreth
blurted.

Blood and souls, woman.

“Are you feeling okay?” Imanol
asked.

“Never better!” Cilreth said.

Now I know something’s wrong.
No cynic here today.

“So the results are amazing and
mysterious,” Cilreth continued. “These things, they aren’t communicating with one
another.”

“They aren’t the sentient
species responsible for this place? Of course not. They’re just like feral dogs
and cats left behind.”

“Oh, no, they’re clearly very
intelligent,” Cilreth said. “They just don’t talk to each other. Incarnate or
electronically. In fact, they actively avoid each other. Yet they have been
modifying contents of their electronic storage, altering the house courses,
even constructing new devices.”

“There’s no way an advanced
civilization—”

“You’re looking at one,”
Cilreth interrupted. “They don’t talk directly. There’s some kind of system
that they use to reserve paths so they don’t see one another.”

“That is a form of
communication. They had to create that system, right? That took an agreement.”

“Seems like it from our point
of view,” Cilreth said. “But maybe one of them made it and the others just use
it.”

“What, like… if I made some
shovels and left them sitting around, another person could come along and use
them, even though we don’t know each other?”

“Maybe, yes,” Cilreth said. “I
don’t know much for sure yet. A Terran society looks very different, very busy
talking back and forth, sharing information in all directions, stuff like that.
It’s just not happening here.”

“You’re missing something,”
Imanol said. “They must have telepathy or some other crazy—”

“No, Imanol, crazy is you
reaching to come up with some explanation of why aliens work the same as we
do.” Cilreth cut the connection.

Imanol rolled his eyes.
Too
damn sensitive
, he thought.
But I’m more wondering about the beginning
of the conversation. She seemed out of it. I know she takes Twitch. Maybe she
moved on to something else?

“Magnus? Hey. Cilreth is acting
strange. I think maybe something happened.”

“Oh no,” Magnus answered over
his link.

“What?”

“Shiny is up to something. She
can’t tell us because he’s listening, I bet.”

“What? We have some reason to
suspect Shiny is behind everything?”

“Our alien friend puts himself
first, from time to time,” Magnus said.

“What might he do? How can we
stop him?” Imanol asked.

“I’ll look into it,” Magnus
said. “The best thing we can do is make sure we stay valuable to him. Then
he’ll share the wealth.”

“Does Shiny actually run this
outfit?”

“No, but without him, PIT is a
lot less than it is now,” Magnus said.

Imanol thought that answer
over. “What are you going to do?” he persisted.

“Check for hidden messages. If
Shiny is keeping her from telling us something, she’ll try to send us clues. We
need to check for any information she’s shuffled around in our area recently.
Check your link memory too. Maybe she knows how to drop something off quietly.”

“Okay, I’ll take a look,” Imanol
said.

My new job is complicated.

***

“These devices confound me,”
Maxsym said. “Granted, I’m no cyberneticist. But these things don’t even work
alike, I think. They seem… often incompatible?”

Maxsym hoped Cilreth would help
him analyze the Blackvine creatures. Cilreth was a fellow obsessive type, but
she had focused on the Vovokan technology.

Can I rip any of her attention
away from it?

“There are different technology
lines in flight within the habitat,” Cilreth said. Her voice became even more
excited. “There are at least three completely different computer networks
running in there. Vastly different. Yet they share a common trinary logic
ancestor technology. That must have been a decade ago, at least using the speed
that Terrans develop these things.”

“Is that evidence of influence
by three different alien civilizations? Any of them look like Trilisk tech?”

“Oh, no. Nothing that advanced.
This stuff seems cobbled together. Look, these creatures make all this. Ninety-five
percent sure, anyway. It’s just this: they’ve been independently developed from
a handful of common ancestors. They don’t talk to one another, and apparently
they don’t share their work much, either!”

“Five entities! That’s insane,”
Telisa said. Maxsym just then noticed she had joined the conversation ten
seconds ago.

“It’s amazing,” Cilreth said.

That’s encouraging. It sounds
like she wants to learn more, too
, Maxsym thought. His link told
him Magnus wanted to talk.

“Something more important has
come up,” Telisa said. “We’ve found the Trilisk.”