The Trilisk Ruins (10 page)

“
Sir, there is an anomaly
ahead.”

Joe stepped forward and looked over the
robot’s shoulder.

“
Whoa,” Joe said. Just
ahead, the smooth concrete floor ended in an irregular hole. The
room at the top of the stairwell emptied into a large cavern.
Clusters of odd red and beige blocks the size of his fist grew out
of the wall in random patches. The groups of cubes had
greenish-colored sticks or spines poking out of them at all angles.
He stared at the odd cavern for a long moment.

“
One, do you have any record
of this sort of... cave?”

“
These structures are
unknown,” One reported.

Joe walked up to the edge of the cave.
He kneeled down to examine the border where the floor ended. The
concrete was sheared off smoothly. There were no chunks or debris
of the room on the floor of the cavern beyond. The walls and
ceiling had been cut off in the same way.

“
This cave or whatever it is
was somehow created after this place was built. The floor wasn’t
built this way, it was cut off.”

One and Two didn’t say anything. Joe
shook his head and paced.

“
None of this is making any
sense,” he complained. “This whole place... I just don’t understand
what’s going on. Something is happening that I’m missing here.
These funny blocks look like kid’s toys.”

Two leveled its rifle and stepped
forward.

“
There is a possible
lifeform reading up ahead.”

“
The orange
crab-thing?”

“
No. The reading is much
larger. A high-metabolism creature with metallic accoutrements.
Possible electronics signature detected.”

“
Shit!” After years in the
service, Joe had never heard these words except in training VRs. He
unslung his rifle, then considered his sidearm for a moment. The
sidearm would be more useful in close quarters, but it was a lot
less sophisticated than the rifle. Its slugs were undiscriminating.
Joe decided to stick with the rifle.

“
Send the profile over to my
rifle,” Joe ordered. He could set the seeker slugs to match the
reading they were getting. “How close is this damn
thing?”

The end of his question was lost in the
painfully loud stutter of automatic weapons fire. One moved
quickly, darting into the tunnel while Two moved up to the edge and
added its own fire.

“
Hold your fire!” yelled
Joe. He almost followed the demand with the question,
Why are you shooting?
But
two things changed his mind. First, Joe realized that the robots
had been told to assume anyone they met were artifact poachers and
should be shot at, and second, Two’s head exploded.

The Series Seven’s torso leaned to one
side. Fragments of metal shot out in all directions and the robot’s
legs froze in place, sending it hurtling to the ground. It fell and
twitched, more lifelike in death than it had been while
operational. Then it stopped moving.

Joe hit the ground and crawled back,
retreating from the mysterious smooth cavern. He heard the boom of
One’s rifle. There was another hissing sound and a metallic
crackling. Any second he expected to feel the impact of a
projectile.

“
Shit! I think we’ve found
something capable of harming humans,” Joe commented dryly. He
accessed his rifle’s interface and logged a target around the
corner, then started shooting as he backed up further, taking a few
steps back down the stairs. He didn’t know if he was hitting
anything, but he hoped that the rounds flinging around the bend in
the cave would be enough to keep the thing from pursuing
him.

“
What have I done?” Joe
asked himself in dismay. He should have told the robots to hold
their fire as soon as he realized the lifeform was possibly an
intelligent alien. As it was, he actually hoped that it was just a
trick of the smugglers. At least that way, he hadn’t just started a
war with an alien race.

Joe turned around and ran back down the
stairs. He couldn’t hear any more sounds of fighting behind. He
kept running down, past the level from which they had arrived until
he hit the bottom of the stairwell three floors down.

Joe linked to the nearest information
service and asked about the floor. A list came up. Joe read
“archives” and then the link scrambled and dropped out. He tried
again and read “fire control station” before the link
disconnected.

He pushed through the stairway door. A
gray corridor stretched to his left and right. He went to the left
until he saw a doorway and pushed through it. Joe found himself in
a restroom. The wall before him was lined with mirrors and
sinks.

Joe looked at his reflection in the
nearest mirror. He saw a wild-eyed man with the beginnings of a
beard from his long flight to Yarnitha. He held his rifle in a
death grip. What chance did he have without any real assault robots
on his side? Just one man?

He had only felt this much fear one
other time in his life. Years ago he had been a cadet in training
at New Kellur, a student of military science at the finest academy
the space force had.

Joe thought he had found a way of
communication outside the censored loop at the academy and shared
certain classified facts with his brother, an engineer outside the
service. When they discovered his transgression despite his
precautions, he had been gripped with a terror that his entire life
had been destroyed. That had felt like he felt now, helpless and
ruined. Joe believed that there were worse things than death, and
living as a prisoner of the world government was one of those
things.

As it turned out, he had been thrown
out of New Kellur and assigned to another, less prestigious officer
school on a faraway planet. He heard years later that his brother
had been interrogated and placed under increased surveillance for a
time. Joe’s career had been downgraded, but despite the bitterness
he cleaned up his act after that. A life in the space force was the
only thing Joe had ever wanted.

Joe thought about that close call so
long ago. He told himself that if he died now, it would not have
been such a bad life. Not as bad as if he had been thrown into a
mining colony to rot and had never joined the space force at
all.

“
I’m gonna die in this
shithole,” Joe mumbled to himself. He checked the load on his rifle
and walked back out into the corridor.

Chapter
Seven

Telisa examined the brightly lit
hallway. The light came from glow rods affixed in the corners of
the ceiling. Thin, dull-colored carpet covered the floor. The walls
were colored a deep green.

“
It’s amazing. We could be
on Earth,” she said.

“
This has to be a UNSF
facility. The power source—it must be some kind of secret research
facility,” said Thomas.

“
But why hide the entrance
in a tube in the middle of a Trilisk ruin?” asked
Telisa.

“
And where are the guards,
the security robots, the automated checkpoints?” added
Magnus.

Thomas shook his head. Jack
shrugged.

“
Something weird is going
on, that’s for sure. Should we bolt?” asked Jack.

“
There should be Trilisk
artifacts here. Let’s find some and then leave as soon as
possible,” said Telisa. She had come so far and didn’t want to give
it all up now.

“
Maybe the place is still
under construction,” said Magnus. “But I can’t explain the field at
the entrance. Unless it’s Trilisk technology the UNSF has
mastered.”

The suggestion was amazing. If the UNSF
had already gleaned some of the secrets of Trilisk technology, then
they were ahead of what she had expected. What powers had the
government scientists gained in secret from the civilian world?
Could they be trusted to use the technology wisely? Telisa didn’t
think so. The government didn’t have the best interest of the
masses in mind anymore. It had grown into a beast of its own that
lived for its own growth and satisfaction.

“
I see some services, but
don’t link up,” Thomas warned. “Security is really lax here, but
maybe the main computer is farther along. It might report us if we
link up and it finds out we’re not UNSF.”

Telisa automatically checked the
services available at the mention of them. There were general ports
for information, and a main library port. She took Thomas’s warning
seriously and didn’t link up. It took a surprising effort of will.
She was accustomed to querying services without a second thought
her entire life.

“
Which direction?” asked
Jack. He looked at Telisa. “Take your pick.”

Telisa shrugged and pointed to her
left. A corridor extended past a set of doorways in that direction.
Magnus took the lead and headed for the first door. He carefully
opened it and peeked inside.

“
Some kind of storage room.
Let’s find something a little more interesting.”

No one disagreed. They moved along the
corridor and started cautiously looking into each room. They found
a meeting room and several more storage areas with boxes in the
corners and lockers along the walls. Then they got to a series of
deserted living quarters, with two beds bunked together in each
one.

Telisa stood in the corridor and sighed
in frustration.

“
Hrm, either it’s just now
finished and not occupied yet, or it’s been abandoned,” Telisa
said. “If it’s been abandoned, then we’re wasting our time here.
The UNSF, or whoever built this place, wouldn’t leave if there were
still artifacts to be found.”

“
Something’s odd around the
corner,” Magnus said. He was at the end of the hallway, unslinging
his slug thrower. Telisa and the others walked forward to the turn
in the corridor, curious to see for themselves.

After the corridor turned, it continued
another thirty feet and then ended in an irregular gaping cave.
There was another ordinary-looking doorway on the left wall.
Everyone advanced closer to the cave, trying to see
inside.

The lights of the corridor showed a
natural-looking space with patches of cube-shaped blocks clinging
to the walls and ceiling. The floor of the cavern was about a meter
lower than the hallway flooring. The edge of the overhang looked
like it had been cut, fitting perfectly into the side of the
cave.

“
Looks like there’s some
damage to the installation here,” commented Thomas. “I don’t
understand. Could some kind of earthquake have caused
this?”

“
Who knows? This planet’s
seismicity is an unknown at this point,” Jack said. “Those blocks
are weird. They remind me of something. I wonder if they’re worth
anything?”

“
Project blox,” Telisa said.
“They look like those kid’s toys... for building all sorts of
stuff.”

“
Well, at this point we have
nothing to lose by taking some. We don’t have any Trilisk artifacts
to weigh us down,” Telisa said bitterly. Somehow the artifacts that
she had been dreaming of had not materialized other than the
inoperative hulks in the building above. There had been no clue as
to the source of the blackfield. Telisa wondered if they should go
back to the entrance and try to break through the walls around it
to find the mechanism.

Jack hopped down and approached one of
the clusters. Telisa examined the edge of the floor where it met
the cavern. Magnus stood next to her while Thomas milled around
behind them.

“
It doesn’t make any sense,”
Telisa pointed out. “The floor meets the cavern perfectly—so do the
walls and ceiling. Where is the rubble from whatever caused
this?”

Thomas pulled aside a ceiling
panel.

“
You think that’s weird,
look at this,” he said. He pointed to a lighting rod above. The LED
filament stopped halfway along its length where it met the cavern,
as if it had been sheared in half by a laser.

Magnus nodded. “Something is wrong. I
don’t have an explanation.”

Telisa stared at the ceiling. She
couldn’t think of what could have caused the strange transition
from hallway to cavern.

“
Well, I have some of these
things, whatever they are,” Jack announced. He had pried some from
the wall with pliers and placed them into a container from his
pack.

Thomas hopped down and reached for
one.

“
Don’t do that,” Jack said.
“Who knows? It might be poisonous.”

“
I agree, you shouldn’t
touch that stuff until we figure out what it is,” Magnus
said.

“
Don’t touch them? This
coming from the guy who just walked through the black doorway? They
could be valuable. Take a few more, and we’ll keep looking,” said
Thomas. “Nobody said this was safe. We could be hurt just by
walking by an artifact.”

Jack was turning back towards the wall
when he exploded. Flesh and blood gouted out of his chest like a
bad horror sim, accompanied by a loud popping sound.

Telisa froze for a moment, watching as
Thomas absorbed in utter shock what had happened. He was literally
covered in blood and body debris.

“
Fall back! Run!” Magnus
ordered.