The Trilisk AI (14 page)

“Something
very interesting ahead,” Magnus said.

“Looks...not
good to me,” Telisa said.

They
entered the room. Scout had already moved around the circumference and
identified a possible exit. Magnus told it to hang close until they could
figure out where they were.

Telisa
approached the first golden thing on its complicated throne. Magnus saw tubes
or wires going into or around it. It was definitely a Vovokan.

“It’s
a body. Like Shiny.”

“Well,
we knew we would see this. Though I was expecting more of a them blown to
pieces, rather than just sitting dead in these weird machines.”

“I
wonder, did Shiny know them? Is this his family? His employees? Slaves?”

“Ask
him.”

Telisa
walked closer.

“Why
are they hooked up? I thought everything was wireless here.”

“These
machines could keep them alive while they’re in virtual realities until they
lost power, maybe.”

Telisa
nodded. “A meat shack.”

“Makes
sense, right? They’re advanced. Highly automated.”

“Shiny
barely seems to eat, though. And he survives on our ship for long periods of
time without eating or drinking. This seems like a lot of hookups for something
so independent.”

“Maybe
they stayed here for years at a time,” Magnus said.

“I
don’t know. We’re missing something.”

“Hospital?”

“Maybe.
I would expect something more advanced, less intrusive, from them in curing
injury or sickness, but that may depend on how severe the problem was.”

Telisa
looked over the creature before her carefully. “I don’t see any wounds. It must
have died some other—ah!”

A
small creature darted over the surface, then dodged into a hole in the outer
husk. Telisa recoiled.

“Five
Holies! Did you see it? Oh. It must be living in the body. Eating it.”

“That’s
one theory,” Magnus said.

Telisa
smiled. “Point taken. Dangerous assumptions. Okay, what else could it be? Let’s
see. An infinitude of possibilities, such as...Vovokans reproduce by mating in
threes, then the body of one fills with larvae and dies. The parent is eaten by
the larvae, and I just saw a baby Vovokan.”

Magnus
shrugged. “It’s totally possible.”

“Another
question for him. I felt like I was asking him a lot of questions on the
voyage, but more keep coming up.”

“Well,
it’s a little hard to talk with him. He speaks well enough, though not fast or
with many details. Maybe he holds out on us. It’s not fair that he learns huge
amounts about us through the network, but we have to phrase each and every
question carefully and still get a vague answer. It felt like I was imposing on
him if I grilled him for more than ten minutes at a time. It was just, ask, get
an answer, over and over; it’s not a two way exchange.”

“And
the map he provided us of this place has a lot of physical detail, but it’s
lacking in background. Come to think of it, he must be holding out on us on
purpose. He could have provided me with an encyclopedia on his house, but he
didn’t. He just gave me a 3D diagram.”

“We
need to ask him for data packages about whole subjects: his government,
society, technology, history, things we can absorb offline. I half think he may
refuse to tell us everything.”

“A
competitive advantage to keep us in the dark?”

“Yeah,
I think so.”

Magnus
signaled Scout to move ahead. So far, they were on the course Shiny had
provided. Magnus hoped their luck held out. The farther they could get on the
planned route before coming across a collapsed section, the faster they would
be able to get in and out with the seed.

Magnus
noticed unusual movement in Scout’s vision feed.

“Telisa.
Heads up,” he transmitted.

She
gave him a curious look, then scanned around. She must have seen the input from
Scout, because she stopped looking frantically around and grew still.

Through
the feed from Scout came the image of a large room filled with moving shapes
and flickering lights in bright colors.

“Five
Entities, it’s beautiful,” Telisa breathed.

Spheres
floated through the room. They were metallic, shining, with lights of rapidly
shifting colors of the rainbow.

Many
similar spheres lay piled on the sandy floor.

“A
lot of them have run out of juice.”

“Let’s
go there now! I want to see those things, grab a couple of them.”

Magnus
stared at the moving spheres. They moved like schools of fish, carefully
synchronized in groups of ten or twenty that flowed around the scene in complex
patterns.

“Maybe
we should figure out what they are first?”

“They
aren’t concerned about Scout.”

“Yeah.
Let’s be ready, though.”

“Of
course.”

Magnus
picked his way through the sandy debris toward Scout. He swept his light over
the dead Vovokans behind them one last time before they left. The golden
corpses reflected his light brilliantly, utterly still and silent.
I hope
they died peacefully. Maybe they didn’t even know anything was wrong.

Telisa
walked eagerly ahead. Magnus considered warning her, but decided to just stay
alert himself. Scout wandered in the room among the floating spheres.

When
they saw the room with their own eyes, it was even more beautiful. The floating
spheres went through the colors of the spectrum in four or five seconds before
starting over. The tiny machines didn’t seem to react to their presence, but
neither did any of them collide with Scout or Telisa as she stepped out into
the open area.

“I
think I know what this is. It’s very much like a dance club,” Telisa said.

“Well,
yeah...”

“Think
about it. Bright lights. But Vovokans can’t hear music. They sense moving mass.
All those spheres, and the ones on the floor used to be moving the same way.
It’s an aesthetic display. It must be very pleasing to them.”

“That’s
a better theory that I have.”

“What
were you thinking?”

“I
thought maybe it was designed to confuse. So many moving bits of mass, so many
lights...it might overwhelm a Vovokan’s senses.”

“For
what purpose?”

“Obscure
something. Hide something. I don’t know. I said your theory was better.”

 Telisa
made a face.

“Scout
saw something. Something warm,” she said.

Damn,
I missed it
, Magnus
thought. He watched Scout’s feed and caught a glimpse of a long, thin signature
of heat. It moved behind something and Scout lost it. “Another critter, maybe,”
he said. Magnus checked his rifle. It was ready to shoot a lethal slug. He
turned in the direction of Scout.

“Don’t
shoot a Vovokan,” Telisa said.

“We’d
probably already be dead if it was one,” Magnus said.

Remember
Jack and Thomas?

Magnus
caught sight of it—a large, ugly creature, like a cross between a giant worm
and a scorpion. It was mottled brown with gold flecks. Magnus tracked it from
about six meters away. The little spheres kept floating in and out of the way.

“I
think it spotted us,” Telisa transmitted. The creature moved straight for them.

“It’s
bigger than I thought. Bigger than the other thing,” Magnus said quickly.

“Should
we shoot?”

Magnus
pointed his weapon but held his fire. He logged the creature as a target.

“Don’t
move. It probably detects mass like Shiny,” Magnus said through his link.

“This
place is like a horror VR.”

Magnus
got a better look through the spinning objects and their bright lights. He saw
mandibles. They were unmistakable, even on an alien creature. Those were meant
to apply huge pressure and break something up. Possibly something to eat. The
mandibles opened and the creature moved the last couple of meters right toward
him.

Magnus
fired his weapon. The sound exploded through the tight space. The creature
bucked upward in response, then it darted forward toward Magnus. He shot again.
The mandibles snapped, but Magnus shuffled back, just avoiding its jaws.
I
wonder if Momma Veer would have saved me that time?

The
creature slowed and stopped, its mandibles frozen open in death. Some of its
many legs still twitched.

“There.
Easy enough. It was just another critter. But bigger than the others,” he said.

Telisa
looked it over, then she seemed satisfied. There were no signs of any clothes
or machine enhancements like Shiny had.

“I
hope it was a Vovokan Rover and not a Vovokan teenager,” she said.

“Rover?”

“You
know. Like a pet?”

“A
pet or wild, yeah. Vovokans have their mouths in back, remember?”

“It
almost bit you. How do you keep so calm? You’re a damn machine.”

Magnus
didn’t answer at first. He didn’t have to say anything. He felt closer to
Telisa than he had to anyone else before, and she risked her life alongside
him.
I can share anything with her.

“The
war. Those orbital attacks. For the first few weeks, I was constantly
terrified. Then, slowly, something changed. My emotions dried up. Kind of like
accepting death, but not giving up.” He grimaced. “That’s not exactly it. I
haven’t tried to say it before. Something inside me changed. Everyone who knew
me before saw it when I got back, but they didn’t say it out loud, because they
knew it was the war.”

“An
insane solution for an impossible situation,” she said.

“It
serves me well enough now,” Magnus said. “I wish I could say it was a triumph
of mind over fear, but I think it was probably more of a natural reaction to
stress. Some kind of a shutdown of the part of my mind that was in drowning in
anxiety and taking the rest of me with it.”

“I’m
sorry you had to go through that. But you know what? I’m glad you’re strong
enough for both of us. I knew there was something different about you from the
beginning. You were distant, but you trained me so well. I could tell you liked
me, even though you never said it.”

He
nodded. She must have seen something on his face.

“Tell
me more,” she said.

“I’m
starting to feel some of the old fear return. Not for me, though.”

“For
me?”

“For
you. I care about you, and I feel the anxiety returning, the fear that you’ll
die.”

Telisa
reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m an adult. I know this is
dangerous. It’s worth it, though. We’ll explore this in depth when we get back
to the
Iridar
,” she said with a tentative smile.

Magnus
laughed out loud at the unexpected reply. “Here I thought I was opening up to
please you, but you don’t want to hear about it any more than I want to talk
about it!”

Telisa
laughed too. “Just means we’re a good couple. We can both keep our respective
emotional messes canned up.”

Chapter 11

Relachik
missed having a battalion of Space Force troopers at his command as he walked
out of the spaceport on Brighter Walken. He realized it was one thing to face
danger at the helm of a ship and another to face it in the flesh. Here, every
man and woman had to exude a sense of hardness to avoid being seen as prey.
Relachik adapted himself quickly. He was fit, armed, and backed by two friends,
one of whom was ex-military. His determination was high. So they marched out of
the
Vandivier
and headed for the Vain Vothrile.

The
surface was bright, as the name of the colony hinted. The white star was far
away, but it still shone with a fierce intensity that made eye protection a
must.

The
spaceport looked fairly primitive. The gritty pavement resisted a few cleaning
machines wandering about. It suited Relachik just fine. The frontier worlds
felt frozen in time, but it was a time Relachik was familiar with. The core
worlds believed in a glitz more virtual than real. They held billions of
eccentrics who spent more time in imaginary worlds than in the real one.

The
club was barely open when they arrived. Only a couple of people were inside. It
looked similar to their simulation, though the wall decor was considerably more
obscene. Half of the booths appeared to have active pornographic holos running.
The images weren’t real, but had been broadcast straight to link and overlaid
onto reality. Relachik screened them out. The feeds were meant to allow other
patrons to see who was interested in what. The feeds could be made private, but
the social atmosphere was all about sharing while under the influence of your
favorite mind-altering chemicals.